From the course: Sibelius Ultimate 2019 Essential Training: The Basics

Editing rhythms - Sibelius Tutorial

From the course: Sibelius Ultimate 2019 Essential Training: The Basics

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Editing rhythms

- [Instructor] Editing rhythms, can be a bit tricky in Sibelius. If a note is selected, then selecting a new duration from the keypad, will change the selected note, into the newly selected duration. It sounds simple enough, but you need to me mindful of a few things. Note durations have defined start time locations, linked to beats within a bar, and their full duration extends out from there. So, if we change a small duration, like an eighth note, into a larger duration, like a quarter note, the notes in rest, to the right of the small duration, will be engulfed by the larger value. Let me undo, command Z, and show you that. This eighth note here, goes away, when I change that eighth note B, into a quarter note. If you change a large duration, like a quarter note, into a smaller duration, like an eighth note, the result will be that you have rests, to the right of the new smaller duration. Still taking up the same amount of time, as the original larger duration. It's important to understand that notes and Sibelius, have those very specific start times, and their durations extend from there. Whether you increase, or decrease their duration, their start time does not change. Take a bar of four quarter notes for example. Let me escape, and let's find a bar of four quarter notes, like this one here, and zoom in on that. Go ahead and find that bar, select a bar, and let's turn the quarter notes into eighth notes, by pressing the number three on our numeric keypad. The result is that each quarter note, turns into an eighth note, with an eighth note rest after it, and their start times do not change. You just have shorter note values on each beat. So as you've just seen, Sibelius will not automatically nudge notes to the left for you, when you're editing a neighboring note's duration. The only way to move notes to the left or right in Sibelius, is by manually moving them, with a cut, copy, paste, or repeat commands, or by using Sibelius' new sliding feature, all of which are discussed later in this editing chapter. That said, there was a new feature built in the Sibelius 2018.1 and later, called "note erosion." This takes affect when you change a small note value, into a larger note value. If there are no additional notes to the right of the affected note, and if the enlarged note value does not completely engulf the note to it's right, then you'll end up with a partial neighboring note value. And this doesn't make a lot of sense unless you see it, so let's take a look at another bar, that has all quarter notes in it. Let's go up to this bar here. And I'm going to go ahead, and just select this first quarter note value. (note playing) Now if I was to turn this quarter note into a half note, it would completely engulf the quarter note next to it, like this. I'm going to go ahead and undo that. And that's still the case, but what happens if I turn that first quarter note into a dotted quarter note, using the rhythm dot on my numeric keypad, leaving an eighth note worth of time for that second quarter note to still exist? And traditionally Sibelius would obliterate the entire second quarter note completely, leaving us with a dotted quarter here, and an eighth note rest. But now, since version 2018.1, what happens is, we get some note erosion of the second note. It basically gets trimmed off a little bit, and ends up starting at a later time. So if we do this again, we turn this quarter note here, into a dotted quarter note. The one to the right gets trimmed off, and erodes, and it becomes an eighth note. You can even have multi note erosion, across a range selection of notes, that's pretty cool. If we make a range selection of like, four eighth notes, like these, select, and hold shift, and click. And if we dot all of these eighth notes, we end up with a dotted eighth, sixteenth, dotted eighth sixteenth, and that's pretty cool. So this is something new for old school Sibelians, to get used to, and something that those of you who are new to Sibelius, will just need to accept as the normal way Sibelius does things. If for some reason, you don't like this new way of doing things, and you like to go back to the old way, you can visit preferences, controller, command, comma, the note input page, the editing section here, and check replace subsequent notes with rests, when extending their duration, that's the old way. I have sneaking suspicion most of us will love this. I'm going to leave it alone for now, I'm getting pretty used to this myself. So that's a bit about editing rhythms, and a lot to get used to. I recommend you spend some time, working in a file like this one, that has a wide variety of rhythms and rests. Spend some time changing the existing note durations, making them smaller, or larger. And watching the result carefully, until you understand how Sibelius is thinking, so that you can eventually anticipate what the result will be, before you see it.

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