Welcome to another helpful hint in my Tips and Tricks sessions. Creating a lead sheet in Sibelius and using plug-ins. In this session, I will be taking you through the process of creating a simple lead sheet consisting of a melody line, chord symbols and lyrics. Then, I will show you a couple of useful plug-ins that will help with creating a simple backing track complete with a strummed guitar, a drum pattern and a simple harmony line. The tune we will use is Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. So, Create a score with a single percussion staff using the blank staff template. Click once on the template and you will be asked to choose your desired instrument (we will choose voice), Choose 4/4 for the Time Signature, Choose C major for the key signature. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as the Title. Now click on Create. You should see this window. We need only 4 bars for this session, so I will delete a bar by holding down the Ctrl key (Cmd for Mac) and click in Bar 5. It will change colour to purple. Press the Delete key.
Entering the melody. To enter the melody, you have many options. Click on the Note Input tab. 1. Select the note value from the Keypad panel and place the notes on the staff. 2. Connect your midi keyboard, select the note value from the Keypad panel and press the appropriate keys on the keyboard. 3. Connect your midi keyboard; click where you would like to start your recording, click on the Record icon. 4. Click on the view tab, select panels and select Keyboard. Select the note value from the Keypad panel and click with your mouse on the desired note pitch. You should now have the following melody. Press the space bar to listen to the melody.
Now, let s add the chord symbols. Click on the Text tab. Then click on the Chord Symbols icon. Your arrow will turn blue. Click on the first note of the score. You will see a flashing cursor above the highlighted note. Type C Upper case. Then hit space bar to advance to the third note of the bar. Type C Upper case again. Move ahead with the space bar and continue adding the chords. Now, let s add the lyrics. Click on the Text tab. Then click on the Lyrics icon. Your arrow will turn blue. Click on the first note of the score. You will see a flashing cursor above the note. As the first word will be hyphenated, we will need to type the following.. Twin (press the hyphen key, then press the space bar) -kle, Twin (press the hyphen key, then press the space bar) -kle, Lit (press the hyphen key, then press the space bar) -tle star. Continue to add the lyrics in the same manner.
Save your work. Now that we have the lead line, we can use a number of the wonderful Sibelius plug-ins to add a simple harmony, a strummed guitar chord line and a drum pattern. Step 1. Add a simple Harmony. Double click in the first bar to highlight the line of music. Go to the Note input tab. Click on the plug-ins icon and select add a simple harmony. Make the following choices and click on create.
Now, highlight the top staff again. Go to the Text tab, select plug-ins, select Realize chord symbols
Now we will add a strumming effect to the guitar staff. Highlight the guitar staff. Go to the Play tab. Select plug-ins and select Strummer.
Finally, we will add a drum pattern. Sibelius has a great percussion Plug-In called Add a Drum Pattern. This automatically creates a drum pattern from a choice of 20-programmed patterns. However, you may find that when you play back the pattern using the Sibelius 7 Sounds, you may find that some of the notes do not play back with the correct sound or even no sound at all. When this happens, the simple fix is to either Edit the percussion staff or create a new percussion staff based on the current one selected. You will now be asked to choose a drum patterns from a range of the 20 patterns available. I am going to un tick all the boxes and choose the Soft rock: ballad (90 110 bpm). Click OK. Any questions, just contact Ray Partridge at Music Technology Matters. Phone: +61 418 159 916 Email: ray@musictechnologymatters.com Web: www.musictechnologymatters.com