At 7:55 PM 06/08/03, Dan Carno wrote:
>What version of Sibelius are you guys talking about? For example,
>articulations can be easily grabbed & moved *vertically*. Sibelius does
>not let you move them horizontally from their centered position, but why
>would you want to?
Well, for one thing, depending on whose style I'm following, I might want a
stemside articulation centered over the notehead or over the stem. I can
imagine other quirky situations where you'll want to make horizontal
adjustments to articulations. Unusual, yes, but why should my software be
limited to only the most normal situations?
For example, suppose you've got an accent on a note that starts a slur.
Normally I'll push the accent up a bit to avoid the slur, but if there's
some extreme vertical crowding going on all around it, I might want to
resort to pushing it a tiny bit to the side instead. That's an ugly
recourse, and I'd rather solve the problem in layout and avoid it
altogether, but sometimes there are extenuating circumstances that call for
unusual responses. That's the point. As long as everything is normal and
uncomplicated, sure, simple rules will do fine. The real test is how the
software performs when you need to do something irregular.
In general, the "why would you want to?" attitude irks me. It's not the
software's job to tell me what I can't do, or what I shouldn't want to do
("in the unlikely event..."!) One thing I love about Finale is that it's
so open-ended. The farther outside the notational norm, the trickier some
things become, but there are very very few things that you can't do at all.
By the way, I don't know if fermatas are entered as articulations in
Sibelius, but in Finale I routinely nudge them horizontally when they're on
rests or whole notes. (But perhaps Sibelius's method of centering is such
that this isn't necessary there?)
This brings us to the question of what is an "articulation". There are
plenty of symbols I like to enter as articulations in Finale even though
they aren't actually articulations per se (eg, arpeggio marks, pedal marks,
breath marks, fingering numbers, etc). Many of those call for horizontal
adjustments.
Another question: In a situation where you're using shorthand for repeated
notes -- eg, a half note with a beam through the stem to indicate four
repeated eighths -- what do you typically do when you need to mark those
eighths staccato with four dots? My habit is to enter my normal staccato
articulation four times and nudge each of them a set amount to the right or
left. I suppose if I had a lot these to do I might set up separate
metatools for each dot, but it comes up so rarely that it hasn't been worth
the trouble. How would you handle that in Sibelius, if you can't move a
staccato dot horizontally?
mdl
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