Composer John Powell in the control room (photo by Melinda Lerner)

John Powell is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand composers, his music having graced more than 50 feature films. British-born, John has called the United States his home for the past fifteen years, during which time he has scored many top films, in addition to collaborating with fellow celebrated composers Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams. He was nominated for an Oscar in 2011 for his score to Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon, and among the many other animated features to which he has provided the score are Ice Age 2 and Ice Age 3, and Kung Fu Panda (with Hans Zimmer).

Powell has also worked on some of the most explosive action movies of the past several years, including all three of the Bourne movies (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) and duelling-assassins caper Mr and Mrs Smith. This year, Powell has scored Happy Feet 2 and Doctor Seuss’s The Lorax, and is currently working on the score for Ice Age 4: Continental Drift, which is expected to be one of the huge hits of the summer.

Photo by Melinda Lerner

Naturally, John uses Sibelius for all of his movie projects.

“Given the extraordinary lateness of which I produce the music and the immense amount of work needed by essentially a small team of orchestrators, were it not for Sibelius’ simplicity, logic, and deftness, we would not be able to make our scoring deadlines,” he says. “Sibelius 7 is easy to use.”

For more information about John Powell and to check out his filmography, visit his Wikipedia page. Doctor Seuss’s The Lorax will open in the UK on 27 July 2012 (it played in the US in March), and Ice Age 4 will also be released this coming summer.

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Introducing the new Sibelius First

by Daniel Spreadbury on April 26, 2012 · 11 comments

in News

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We’re very pleased to announce that a new version of Sibelius’s little brother, Sibelius First, is available from today, with some great new features never before seen in music notation software (including Sibelius 7!). Sibelius First is designed for home users, students, instrumental teachers, songwriters, choir masters – anybody who needs to quickly and easily produce beautiful sheet music, but who doesn’t need all the power and flexibility of the full Sibelius 7 product.

The new Sibelius First replaces the existing versions of both Sibelius First and Sibelius Student, which were separate entry-level products with similar feature sets, though there were some key differences, such as the inclusion of dynamic parts in Sibelius First but not Sibelius Student, and the inclusion of Panorama in Sibelius Student but not Sibelius First. With the new Sibelius First, we’ve combined the feature sets of both products to produce an even more powerful and comprehensive music notation package, at a pretty amazing price.

Some of the highlights of the new version include:

  • Exclusive, professional-quality 10GB sound library
  • Simplified, task-orientated user interface
  • Export a video of your score
  • Send your score, in Sibelius or PDF format, by email
  • Publish directly to ScoreExchange.com
  • Publish directly to Facebook, YouTube and Soundcloud
  • Format your score for Avid Scorch for iPad

These features are exclusive to Sibelius First and are not included even in the full Sibelius 7 product. They are (if you will excuse the pun) firsts for music notation software! Read on for more details.

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A plug, yesterday (courtesy Samuel Livingstone on Flickr)

In this guest post, plug-ins maven Bob Zawalich shares his tips on how to make plug-ins in Sibelius appear on any ribbon tab. Bob has written more than 300 plug-ins for Sibelius, and nearly all of his creations are either included in Sibelius by default or available for download from the Sibelius web site.

In Sibelius 7, plug-ins are distributed among different tabs on the ribbon. Thus, playback-related plug-ins are on the Play tab, text-related plug-ins on the Text tab, and so on. Most downloadable plug-ins install into folders that are on the Home tab, but you can set things up so that a plug-in can reside on any tab, even those (such as Parts) that usually have no plug-in menu. Read on to find out how.

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Sibelius makes light work of ETHEL’s new album Heavy

by Daniel Spreadbury on April 23, 2012 · 1 comment

in People

ETHEL in the studio

The New York-based experimental string quartet ETHEL (@ETHELCentral) are one of the most exciting chamber music groups performing today. Founded in 1998 by graduates of Juilliard and Eastman / SUNY Stony Brook, the group has built a reputation both as champions of contemporary and new music, but also music education through its Foundation for the Arts. ETHEL’s third studio album, Heavy, hits shelves and digital retailers tomorrow, 24 April, and I got in touch with founder member Ralph Farris, who is both the viola player and Artistic Director of the group, to find out how Sibelius was used in the production of the album.

One work in particular, a commission by New York-based composer Raz Mesinai (@RazMesinai) called La Citadelle, needed work in Sibelius to take it into the studio. Ralph picks up the tale:

“Raz Mesinai and I are dear old friends, and I was thrilled when ETHEL was able to commission him, with the generous support of the Jerome Foundation, to write La Citadelle. This extraordinary piece was inspired by the life of Antoine de Saint Exupéry, pilot and author of The Little Prince, a sonic meditation on Saint Exupéry’s mysterious last flight.”

Raz and ETHEL worked together closely in a number of sessions as they shaped the work together. “Raz sent me a MIDI file of his finished piece,” Ralph told me. “That’s where Sibelius came in. The world’s greatest notation program made short work of organizing the piece into a score – Keep track order? Yep! Adjust rhythms? Nope! Tenuto? Sure! – and, of course, part extraction was a piece of cake. Sibelius truly gave us access to Raz’s voice.”

Ralph says he couldn’t be happier with how the work turned out. “The finished piece is magnificent,” he says, “infusing cinematic soundscapes with the rolling rhythms and sung poetry of the bedouins of Algeria. We could not be more grateful to the good folks at Sibelius for making it possible to bring Raz’s vision to life!”

You can hear La Citadelle and other works by Don Byron, John Halle, Julia Wolfe, John King, David Lang, Kenzi Bunch and Marcelo Davos performed by ETHEL on Heavy, available on April 24 through Innova.

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How to run Sibelius 7 without the Quick Start window

April 3, 2012

Warning: this post gets a bit nerdy about software windowing models. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, try this instead. Likewise, if you’re a Mac user, you might find all this a bit parochial. Like all good modern applications, Sibelius 7 uses the Single Document Interface (SDI) model, which means that each [...]

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Everything old is new again: Sibelius 7 now supports Windows XP

April 2, 2012

When we released Sibelius 7 last summer, the minimum system requirements jumped significantly: on Mac, we dropped support for Macs with PowerPC processors, and specified Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as the minimum supported operating system; and on Windows, we dropped support for Windows XP. The changes in requirements on Mac didn’t have much [...]

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Sibelius 7.1.2 update now available

March 31, 2012

A new Sibelius 7 update is available from today, bringing the program to version 7.1.2. This update is free for existing Sibelius 7 users, and includes more than 150 bug fixes and improvements. Among the most significant improvements in this release are substantial performance improvements to both screen redraw and editing speed, improved support for [...]

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Sibelius 7 Essential Training on Lynda.com

March 29, 2012

If you’re looking for ways to learn Sibelius 7, you’re spoiled for choice. Not only is there comprehensive on-screen documentation provided with the software (which you can also download here), an optional printed version of the Sibelius 7 Reference Guide, an excellent book in the Avid Learning Series by James Humberstone, Sibelius 7 Music Notation [...]

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Upcoming Sibelius clinics on the Pacific coast

March 28, 2012

If you’re fortunate enough to live in the western United States of America, you may be interested in some upcoming training days and clinics being run by two master clinicians: Mike Klinger of the Synthesis MIDI Workshop, and Bruce Munson, formerly of Sibelius and now self-employed at Munson Music Services. Their upcoming clinics are as follows: [...]

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Rogue Amoeba release Audio Hijack Pro and Airfoil updates to fix Sibelius conflict

March 27, 2012

Many Sibelius users also have one or more of the excellent audio utilities from Rogue Amoeba installed on their Macs, such as Audio Hijack Pro or Airfoil. Both of these products include a feature called Instant On, which allows the applications to capture audio from an application that is already running, rather than requiring the [...]

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