Could you send me your email address again? The one you sent me didn’t work.

Thanks for stopping by and letting us know about the quick start guide.

Jeremy,

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get to your questions. If you contact me below I’ll be happy to send you our house style sheet for our lead sheets. A good Sibelius forum can be found at http://www.sibeliusforum.com/forums/faq.php.

i actually work for Sibelius as training manager for east coast USA. We have some great free tutorial resources for download on this page, including a quick start guide which contains almost everything you need to know about Sibeliuus in 26 pages: http://www.sibelius.com/helpcenter/hintsandtips

Right now I use it primarily for lead sheets for my music teams - doing my own arrangements and songs. (On a side note - I’m a big believer in using lead sheets as opposed to chord charts - it unifies people on melodies, helps harmonies get learned more quickly, and encourages better musicianship by following an actual song form with endings, etc. It also makes my leading at rehearsals better by being able to say “let’s look at measure 56″, instead of “let’s look at the second verse, third line, you know that one note on the word “love”?)

Other helpful things (not exclusive to Sibelius, but to notation software in general) are scanning/OCR programs to scan in sheet music so you don’t have to start from scratch with new arrangements (Sibelius’ included basic version of PhotoScore will get keys and notes in - you can upgrade to a Pro version which imports everything), and a basic MIDI keyboard to input notes. I use a little 25-key Oxygen8 that works great - so much faster than using mouse/keyboard, even for step-time input.

I also use it for creating worksheets/reference sheets to help out musicians too, which is nice. When I interned, I got that church started using simple lead sheets for their powerpoint, which I thin is a great idea. I haven’t implemented that here yet, but if/when I can get an assistant :) , I might have time to do some of that…

Just some thoughts from a guy in the trenches. Hope that’s helpful…

John
St Andrews Episcopal

I had been working with a similar co-worker setup, needing to transfer files between the two programs. The way we got around it was to save the Finale file as an ETF file, which would open up no prob in Sibelius. The wonderful folks over at Finale, though, have now put an end to this workaround by removing the ETF capability with the release of Finale 2008. I have stuck with my version of 2007 in order to keep this “handshake” going, and perhaps Finale 2008 has some new feature to do this that I haven’t found, but this is one of the most aggravating things about Finale.

A similar nuisance is that earlier versions of Finale cannot open files saved in a later version. (e.g. I can’t open a file saved with 2008 with my 2007 software) Does Sibelius have this same version road block?

(a little about myself: I have been using Finale since I purchased Finale 1998. I was “trained” on it in school, so it’s the only thing I’ve known. I love that it gives me omnipotence as an engraver, as I still have some pro printing gigs, but most of my notation work day-to-day is writing charts that don’t need the pro touch. I’ve gotten the Sibelius bug a few times, and this deal is too good to pass up, so I may be a new man by month’s end)

Bob, thanks a megaton for posting this!

Finale even in the free version was way to complex. I also used a British program called Mozart 99. Easy to use and inexpensive.