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

Inserting bars and adding irregular bars - Sibelius Tutorial

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

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Inserting bars and adding irregular bars

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- [Instructor] For a while now I've been having you use the shortcut Control or Command + B to add bars to your score. There are actually three ways to add bars to your score and you can see all of them at the Home tab, Bars group, by clicking on the disclosure triangle under the word Add. Here you can see that the first choice for adding bars is Add Bar At End, and that's what we've been doing using the shortcut Control or Command + B. There are however two additional ways to add bars to your score in Sibelius. First, the Add Single Bar command is what you'll use when you want to add a single bar to the right of any selection, or with nothing selected in the score, selecting this option will load the mouse with a single bar so that you can click it wherever you want to in the score. Let's go ahead and try this. Escape so that nothing is selected, choose Add Single Bar. That loads it in the mouse, you can hover next to a bar line and click, and Sibelius will expel a bar onto the page to the right of wherever you clicked. Now try this one more way, go ahead and select a bar in the score, and we're going to add a bar to the right of that, by going up to the Home tab to the Bars group, the drop-down for Add, Add Single Bar, and it adds a single bar to the right of your selection. The shortcut for Add Single Bar is Control + Shift + B on Windows or Command + Shift + B on Mac, and you can try that as well, make a selection, run that shortcut, and it adds a bar to the right of your selection. So this feature will definitely come in handy as you're copying and creating music when you need to add a bar to your score, somewhere other than at the end. The other add bar feature in the drop-down menu is called Add Multiple or Irregular Bars, and it's actually two features in one. First, if you want to add a bunch of bars to the middle of your score at once, you can do this by either loading in them in your mouse and clicking them onto the page or you can make a selection and Sibelius will add them after the selection. I'm going to go ahead and Escape, and I'll load a few bars into the mouse. So Escape and then choose Add Multiple or Irregular Bars, and when you get the dialog window you can type the number of bars you'd like to add. I'll go ahead and choose three. And then click OK and that's going to load three bars into my mouse and I'm going to click those right here after bar eight, and there they are. Now the second option with this feature is to add what Sibelius calls an irregular bar. It will help to understand what an irregular bar is first before you try to add one. And the reason I brought back this example file for us is because it actually contains an irregular bar and provides you with a good reason to use one. So this file's original bar nine where the first ending is here is what we consider to be an irregular bar. Notice how even though the time signature is 3/8, this bar is actually in 2/8, even though the meter doesn't change. Of course this was to make up for the pickup at the start of the piece. So there is a good reason to do this in this example. But if you had noticed this on your own, you may not have known how it was possible to have what seems like a 2/8 bar in the middle of a 3/8 passage. The answer is create and add an irregular bar which is a bar that has a different time signature from the existing time signature, but which will not actually show a time signature change. So let's add an irregular bar of our own. I'm going to Escape so we can load it into the mouse, go to the Home tab, Bars group, that drop-down for Add, and choose Add Multiple or Irregular Bars. This time in the dialog window, select the bubble for Irregular, and then go ahead and choose the total note value that you want represented in the bar. For this example, perhaps choose a 1/4 note which would be like having a 2/8 bar, or you can do something crazy like a whole note, which will give you four full beats. Once you choose the desired value, click OK. It's going to load that into the mouse and then you can click that somewhere onto the score page. I still have, let me show you what just happened, I still had three bars selected up here, I could have made that one, it doesn't matter. So what it actually ended up giving me was three irregular bars, essentially in 4/4, although the meter didn't change. Now at first you may not notice that the bar or the bars are irregular. If you add some note values into the bar though, there's a 1/4 note or two. Let me just fix that up, there we go, there are our four beats, and I assure you the rest of those are also in essentially 4/4. So the shortcut for adding multiple or irregular bars is Alt or Option + B if you'd like to use that. Now all of these are very important features to know, and you'll use most of them a lot. The irregular bars feature makes untraditional notation, cadenzas, worksheets, and things like that very easy to create. A lot of people don't know you can even do this sort of thing by just simply adding a special type of bar. If you put enough of these in your score you're certain to impress your friends or confuse a bunch of musicians but you'll likely have a few people asking you how did you do that? And then you can decide to give away the trade secret or not. So enjoy working with all of the different ways to add bars.

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