- [Instructor] This is one of two short videos,
to accompany the Sibelius/Logic Arranging project.
These videos are not substitutes
for the detailed written instructions on the website.
I'm just using these videos to help you visualize
to see more easily where some of these tools are
and how you perform these actions
because that can be easier to do,
visually than through text descriptions.
But I'm assuming that you will be reading carefully
and following along closely the step by step directions
which this is not a substitute for.
So this is an arranging project,
you're going to begin by opening this short piano piece,
the chopin_28_4 piano prelude,
and then arranging it for a small ensemble of instruments,
of four instruments.
You could do this in a very traditional way,
like picking a very classical ensemble
that would sort of be appropriate to the style of the piece,
like a string quartet
or another group of like sounding instruments
like four Clarinets,
or you could do something much less traditional
and experimental.
The only thing that I'm concerned about
in terms of the assessment,
is that when you choose instruments,
you are careful that the notes you're giving them
are in their appropriate playing range
that you're not writing notes out of range.
Sibelius will help you see this.
Now when you arrange a piece for another ensemble,
change it from piano to string quartet, say,
there can be a certain amount of arrangers license
and creative leeway that you can take.
So it isn't necessarily just
a sort of machine-like secretarial action of like putting
this note in this instrument and that's the end of it.
So for instance,
if you were to do this for string quartet,
you'll find that the bottom notes can all
be played very nicely by the cello
until you get to the very end.
And then there's a note that's just a half step
below the lowest note that the cello can play.
So it would be a shame to give
up your idea of using cello just for one note, right?
So you can make some subtle adjustments
to try to make this work,
move notes into a different register, for example,
but if you do that,
just be thoughtful that you're not making an abrupt leap
where there should be a smooth step.
So maybe instead of just jumping
to the register that you need for a certain note,
you might move to that other register a little bit earlier
if that's a smoother way of doing it.
Or in the harmony chords,
if a note is outside the range of the instrument
or sounds inappropriately high or low,
even if it's within the range,
you could also adjust the voicings
of the harmony chords somewhat.
Just be sure that whatever you do,
doesn't too much alter the sounds, the harmony,
the melody, the baseline that are inherent
to the piece that you're arranging.
All right, so you make a decision.
Let's decide, let's say I wanna write for three strings
for the accompaniment parts
and maybe give the melody to a Clarinet.
So you need to call up
the instrument dialog box in Sibelius
the shortcut, keyboard shortcut I for instrument,
and that will bring this dialog,
Add or Remove Instruments.
So over here we have instrument categories,
I'm going to choose Strings.
And I can select more things more than one thing at once.
I could select Violin, Viola, whoops,
Violin, Viola and Cello
then I still have to click Add to Score here.
And the pop-up over here showing me
that I have these new staves in my score
and I was going to use Clarinet,
so go in the Woodwind category
and pick soprano Clarinet in B flat,
that's Clarinet B flat, the ordinary clarinet.
So now I have these new instruments in my score
and you can leave it as is
or just for clarity while you're looking at this,
if you want to take the original piano part
and make sure that it's all the way on the top
or all the way on the bottom.
So it's easier to see the layout
in your score of the old versus the new instruments.
You could select the Piano staves
and then click the Down or the Up button
to move the position of the staves.
Then you click OK,
and you'll get this full score arrangement now
with the original piano part and the new instruments.
So the first thing you're gonna do is copy the melody part,
the right-hand of the piano
into whatever you've chosen for your melody instrument.
And here there's the nice shortcut in Sibelius,
that if you click on a blank area of a staff,
it selects an entire measure.
But if you double click that blank area,
it selects that staff for the whole system.
And if you triple click, a blank area quickly enough,
you'll see that it's selected that staff
throughout the whole score, which is nice.
So now that that staff was selected,
you might think, Oh I should copy it into the clipboard.
You know, Command+C for copy,
and then paste it, Command+V where I want it to go.
And you can do that,
but in Sibelius the nice thing is that you don't have to,
because in music notation,
you're so often copying music from one place to another,
that Sibelius works that even as soon as something
is even selected on screen,
it's automatically in the clipboard available for copying.
So what you do is take the music that's selected,
point your mouse where you want it to start,
the target area,
and then just holding down the option key,
if now click, you'll see that,
Oh magically that has now been copied there.
So that's how I'm going to copy the melody part
into the new instrument.
And again, you're going to want to check
that everything's in range
and you can also listen to playback in Sibelius, right,
to see what it sounds like.
So with that staff selected, for instance,
it will play back only the sounds and the selected staves.
So if you hit P for play,
or if you want to have more easy visual control
over the whole playback situation,
you can call up the transport controls by holding
Option+Command+Y,
Y for play,
and then you'll get this, these transport controls.
So you can audition that
and see does that sound good in that range?
Or do the high notes just sound too strange
or the low notes sound too muffled or something?
So you can make some musical decisions about
whether that was a good choice for assigning
the melody instrument,
or if you want to change instruments
or maybe leave that instrument
but make some thoughtful adjustments of
what octave certain things are happening in, for example.
So that's otherwise very straightforward.
Now we're going to do the kind of cool thing
which is we're going to select the left hand,
which is mostly the mid-range harmony part, right?
Rather than having like an independent baseline
as well as harmony.
It's mostly just these three note chords.
So I'm going to, once again, triple click, any blank spots
in that lower staff now that lower staff is selected
throughout this chord.
This time, in order to do what I'm going to do next,
which is called exploding this music into multiple staffs,
this time you do have to actually copy
that is you have to like in most programs,
hold down on Mac, Command+C,
or go to the Edit menu above and choose Copy.
So you copy that then into the three staves
where I'm going to distribute these chords,
the Violin, Viola, and Cello.
What I wanna do is once again,
click sort of the target where I wanna start.
This time now though I'm going to hold down Shift and click
so that all three of those staves are selected.
And now that I've selected all three of those staves,
and I've copied the music that I want into the clipboard.
Now I go to the, what is it?
The Note Input tab,
on the top here,
and in Note Input almost all the way to the right,
there's the Arrange panel.
And in this Arrange panel,
I wanna go to the second option Explode.
So I'll choose Explode,
it'll think about it for a second and bingo,
all of the notes of these, of the lower staff on the piano,
the left-hand have now been distributed,
one note each to those three instruments.
Now that's a nice shortcut,
it's a handy tool,
it's a nice trick,
but you are going to have to go
and check it and clean it up.
Because in places where there are exactly three notes
in the chord and you want the notes distributed,
one, two, three like that it'll happen automatically.
But in places where there are fewer notes,
like if there's just a single bass note or octave
in the base like here,
then something else will happen.
It will maybe give a note to more than one instrument
and maybe that's fine,
but maybe that's something you wanna change
and get rid of those new doublings.
You can also drag the staves various way,
so you can see more clearly what's going on.
Also some of these notes will be way out of range
because really the piano part here is not one thing,
the chords, but really two things,
the chords and like an implied independence lower base part
in some places.
So in those places,
you may need to make some adjustments
to make your arrangement for the sound more appropriate.
I talk about that a little bit more
in the instructions as well.
So you will have to do some cleanup
but it's a nice way to quickly get the music
into multiple staves.
Likewise, at the end, you have some chords
that have more than three or four notes.
So you're gonna have to make some changes there
to make that work for the three single line instruments
that you've chosen.
And that is a condition of this part of the project
that you're arranging this for single line instruments
like wings and strings not for like guitar
or organ or vibraphone or other, other instruments,
harp, that that play chords by themselves.
One thing I should mention here too,
if you haven't encountered this before,
some instruments that you might choose are
what are called transposing instruments,
which means that they read music actually
at different pitches in a different key
than the sounds that result.
So for example, the Clarinet is a Clarinet in D flat,
that means that when it plays,
what it sees as the note C actually the sound that comes
out what's called concert pitch,
is the note B flat.
There are two different ways of viewing
the clarinet in the score.
You can view it at what's called concert pitch
which means what you see is what you get.
It's going to be the sound in pitches that are notated
or you can view it in what's called transposed score
which means the Clarinet part will look like
what the clarinetist is actually going to see
in their music,
which is not the actual concert pitch.
And what you do is you go to the Home tab,
and if you go to the icon that says Transposing Score
that has a little key signature picture
and click on that,
it will toggle back and forth
between concert pitch, sounding pitch,
which is what we have here
and transposed score where any transposing instruments
will be notated as they will appear for them.
All right, so at this stage of the project,
you are going to do a certain amount of work
which I'm going to gloss over here in this video
but you're going to do a certain amount of work to see
that it sounds like what you want it to sound like,
the instrument choices.
And that, again, you sort of taken care
of any register issues
and you have made appropriate choices
where there are more than three notes
or fewer than three notes,
so that everything works out.
But after you've done all that,
what I want you to do is to print everything.
So you're going to print a full score,
that is all of the parts together
the way it looks here on the screen right now.
And you're also going to print individual parts such as
you would give to each player,
the Clarinetist gets the Clarinet part,
and so on.
Now, you don't literally have to print this to paper,
and use trees and ink and money,
you just have to make PDF files
which you'll put in your folder and submit along
with everything else in this project.
So here it's important to follow
the written directions very closely, okay?
Because Sibelius has a number of sort of fancy shortcuts
and kind of batch printing techniques like to print all
the parts at once,
or to send all the parts to print them
and send them by email,
and so on.
The thing is these tools either don't work consistently
and are difficult to tweak
to make them do what they're supposed to do,
or they work fairly well
but only when you're literally printing,
not when you're saving to PDF files.
So do follow the written instructions very closely here
and what you're going to do,
I'll just mention it briefly here,
is you're going to use the print command, Command+P,
or if you prefer,
you can click on the File tab
and go down to print either way,
you'll get to this dialog box.
And then you're going to just have
to make multiple passes to make this work.
So to Print the full score,
you select if it isn't already selected,
Print full score.
You can ignore all of these fancy options,
All pages, Normal, left, right collated, blah-blah-blah,
just skip that.
Scroll down, if it's not visible,
you'll have to scroll down all the way to the bottom
and then click on this button that says,
Use OS dialog.
And what that button does is it tells Sibelius
to stop trying to be so helpful,
to get out of the way and just let me print
the regular old ordinary way using
my computer's operating system.
So don't click any of these other things
that kinda let Sibelius try to take
over your print operation,
just select Full score,
go down to the bottom and then use OS dialog.
Then you'll get whatever dialog box you normally get
on your computer about printing.
And if you're on Mac somewhere, it will say PDF,
and you can say, Save as PDF.
If you're on windows,
you'll have an option for,
I think it's called Print to PDF on windows operating system
but one way or another,
you'll choose this option.
And then once you've chosen, Save as PDF,
then choose a location and fix it and it should be all set.
Then you have to go back and do that again
for each individual part.
So I'll once again, I go to the print dialog,
this time I go to Print parts
and you might think,
Oh great, now I can just select all the parts at once.
No, that will not work.
At least not when you're printing to PDF,
you have to select each part
and do this separately for each part.
Select the top part,
once again, go down to use OS dialog,
go through those whole steps just as we did before.
One other thing to keep in mind,
if you are doing this in the music tech lab,
in the music building,
it might let you do this without any trouble
but it's also sometimes the case
that it will prompt you to enter an ID
and a passcode to be able to use the printer.
Even though you're not really using the printer at all,
but just gonna be saving as PDFs,
it may prompt you for an ID and password.
If that happens,
just leave the ID and password blank,
and click OK,
and it will probably let you continue, right?
So you can ignore that.
Just click, OK,
it should let you go.
And I want you to go through all these steps
even though we're not giving your arrangement
to actual real musicians to play,
just so that you know how to do all these things.
And that you understand that the end product of notation
for most people is going to be a piece of paper or a PDF.
You don't want to send a Sibelius file,
or a finale file or use a music score file,
or whatever music notation you're using,
you don't in general want to send that to some musician,
if you don't know that they have your program
in your version and can open it up
and see what you want them to see, right?
The end result of a music notation file
for most end users is going to be paper
or PDF just like the end results of a doll file,
like a logic arrangement that you make
is going to be some sort of audio file,
a wave file, an MP3 and so on.
So that takes care of the whole printing.
There's one other thing that you need
to do still in Sibelius.
So before we move over to logic,
you need to export this file as a standard MIDI file
which logic is going to be able to interpret.
So once again, you go to the File tab,
all the way on the left top left
and then you go to Export and you choose MIDI.
And this is the wonderful magic of MIDI, right?
That a Sibelius score will not look exactly the same
if you open it up in some other program.
And it won't sound the same,
if you open it up in some sort of MIDI or audio program
but you can export a Sibelius file to MIDI,
so that the basic information will be readable,
interpretable by any MIDI,
any good MIDI compatible application.
So we go to the MIDI file,
it's going to give you this Export MIDI dialog box.
You want to choose that the MIDI file would be played using
a different playback device,
i.e., not Sibelius' internal sound engine.
You can leave this at general MIDI
or set it to general MIDI
if it's not there.
Type 1, tick resolution,
you can leave all that as is,
and then go down to the Export button
and it should create a MIDI file,
which then you can open up in logic.
And I'll talk about the various actions
that you need to do in logic,
in the next video.