Tips for Beginners

If you are using Sibelius for the first time, this is the place to go. Here you will find a selection of useful pages within this wiki as well as a few tips on how to do things.

If you are using Mac OS 10.5, Mac OS 10.6 or Windows Vista, you may want to look at the respective sections on the helpcenter.
Right after installing Sibelius you should make sure that you have the latest version. You can do that in the Help menu.
The aforementioned helpcenter has a great deal of useful information and features a Chatpage where you can ask questions.

As this wiki provides tips and tricks to specific problems or tasks which are not featured in the manual, you should probably just get familiar with the software. After you have done that, come back and read a bit here and there; you might be surprised how many useful things we can teach you. It is always good to have a look at the index (look at the left).

- If you want notes to play for more than one bar you obviously need to use ties. Use the tie command located on the Enter-key, not the slur (which is there to indicate phrasing) by pressing “S” on the keyboard. Otherwise the notes won't play through.

- You may find the playback volume rather low. Do not resort to only writing fff passages. Instead open the mixer by typing “m” and crank up the main volume and/or the volume of your virtual instruments (probably Sibelius Player).

- If playback markings are seemingly ignored, you probably have Live Playback activated. Live Playback data overrides dynamics. Either remove Live Playback data or switch it off completely.

- It should be obvious, but: The Sibelius manual is actually very good, so you can and should read it, because it answers a ton of questions.

- If not all staves are played you may not have enough free slots for your instruments. This can be solved by adding instances of kontakt in the playback devices. If you use Sib 5.2 or greater, Sibelius will offer to add these if necessary. In Sibelius 6 Kontakt is not used anymore and the application handles playback automatically.

- Some of the most popular beginner mistakes are clarified in 10.5_dynamics. (TBC)