Kudos to Sibelius
Aug 16th, 2008 | By admin | Category: BlogWell it’s time to give credit where credit is due. I have to say that I am thankful for the ease of use of Sibelius cause I think it really helped my students create their first band piece. The first day of camp, I had them copy a piano piece into the computer and then use the “explode” feature of the Arrange function to arrange it for concert band. That really gave them a sense of accomplishment at the end of the first day of camp! Then I used that to teach them how to write percussion parts. The only problem is, when you use woodblocks or some other pitched percussion, and you try to convert your score to a Scorch file, the woodblock sound turnes into a flute sound when you listen to it on the web. I’ve got to figure that out. Anyway, the third day of camp they started their own composition, and we did a lot of cutting and pasting to make it work. I will say that the nice thing about Sibelius is that you can highlight a section and move it up or down by steps using the arrow keys. The kids learned that if they moved it up 3 steps it sounded pretty. They didn’t have to understand the concept of intervals, theory, thirds, etc… just use the computer to make it sound good. I was really impressed with some of the harmonizations - see Megan Westcott or Jake Goodridge’s pieces to see an example. That was very helpful in avoiding the theory and allowing them to just write harmony. There are still things that make Sibelius difficult to teach with - namely, deleting multiple measures (which is way too complex), adding measures (you never know if it’s going to come before or after the measure you’ve selected, and if you want to add multiple measures to the end of the piece it adds it to the second to last measure), and the fact that it freezes sometimes. It was really helpful to have the software in general, though, cause I was able to bring them pretty far in a week. I don’t think they could have written a full band piece with pencil and paper in 2.5 days. Thanks!
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