Welcome to another helpful hint in my ‘Tips and Tricks’ sessions.

Using Sibelius to generate ‘sight reading’ exercises.

Trying to find a supply of music suitable for ‘sight reading’ exercises is always a challenge. Because, after all, once you or your student has played a piece of music, it is no longer a ‘sight reading’ exercise. Sibelius can make creating ‘sight reading’ exercises simple and fast. So firstly, I am going to create a score for a Bb Trumpet student by opening the ‘Quick Start’ window and choose ‘Blank’. I then select A4 page size, and click on ‘Change Instruments’.

I select Trumpet in Bb

Time Signature 4/4

Key Signature Bb Major Create a Title for my Exercise “Trumpet Sight Reading Exercise” and click on ‘Create’.

You will have the following staff on the page. I am going to have an 8 bar exercise, so I click on ‘add bars’ in the ribbon (or Ctrl + ‘B’ x 3 times) and I now have 8 bars. I want 4 bars per line, and the easy way to achieve this is to click once on the 4th bar line of the score and then hit the ‘Enter’ key. The following bars will shift to the staff below. At this point, I will ‘lock’ these bars into this position by going to the ‘layout’ tab and choosing ‘format’ > ‘lock format’.

Doing this will place layout marks on the screen. So I will hide these going to the View tab and ‘un-ticking’ the ‘layout marks’ button. I want the notation to be in ‘concert pitch’, so I will click on the ‘Transposing score’ button found under the ‘Home’ tab. Now, I will enter a C major scale in crotchets. This will set the ‘highest and lowest’ notes for my student to play. To copy these 2 bars to the remaining 6 bars, I highlight the 2 bars; hit the letter ‘R’ on my QWERTY keyboards 3 times. This is the short cut for ‘Repeat’.

I will now highlight the whole 8 bars, navigate to the ‘Note input’ tab, click on the ‘Transformations’ icon and choose ‘Shuffle Pitches’.

This ‘rearranges’ the pitches of the notes, but keeps the range within the specified range (in this case, 1 octave). For my more advanced students, I choose ‘Randomize pitches’.

The same technique works for quavers as well.

I can also highlight the whole 8 bars and add ‘staccato’ or other articulations. Phrase marks are also easy to add. Just add them for the first bar only and then highlight the bar and hit the ‘R’ key 7 times!!!

Then use the ‘Shuffle pitches’ tool and……… If you would like the student to play the quavers in a ‘swing’ style, then you simply need to go to the ‘Play’ tab and choose ‘Performance’. In the subsequent window, you have the option to choose a range of playback styles including ‘swing’. Now, how about we try getting our student to play ‘triplets’

Enter the first quaver into Bar 1 of a blank 8 bar score, press and hold the ‘Ctrl’ key and press the number ‘3’ just above the ‘W’ and ‘E’.

Now, I would like Sibelius to continue entering triplets until I tell it to stop. This is also called using ‘sticky keys’. After I Press Ctrl = ‘3’ to create the triplet, I then press ‘Alt’ + ‘Shift’ + ‘K’. This places a small ‘blue’ ‘3’ above the highlighted note.

I can now continue to add quavers and Sibelius will continue to make them all triplets (until I press ‘Alt’ + ‘Shift’ + ‘K’ again. I complete the 8 bars of quavers, create 4 bars per line, choose ‘shuffle pitches’ and we are done.

If my next student is an Alto Sax player, I use the ‘Change Instrument’ icon on the Home Tab.

Choose Alto Sax

Then click once at the start of the score. All transposed correctly. Any questions, just contact Ray Partridge at Music Technology Matters. Phone: +61 418 159 916 Email: ray@musictechnologymatters.com Web: www.musictechnologymatters.com