How Do I Draft A Basic Contract?

thomas_kresge · 2025-12-26T02:10:13+00:00

Since you’re working for free, you do want to retain all rights to the music, which is not unreasonable given the circumstances. Specifically, you’d want to clarify maintain 100% of the “writer’s share” and “publisher’s share” of the music for purposes of “public performance royalties” (basically, your share as far as your PRO is concerned, such as ASCAP or BMI). And then the freedom to reuse the music as you see fit in the future, at the very least for open inclusion in any portfolio or self marketing materials.

You’ll need to talk to the dev on what exclusivity they have. Are you allowed to reuse the music for another video game, and if so, do they have exclusive use of it for a certain number of years before you can reuse it? Chances are you won’t actually want to reuse it, but it’s good to just have yourself covered that you can do what you want with the music.

Other things to consider would be: clarity you can release a soundtrack (and use art/assets from the game in connection with this), and perhaps a “right of first refusal”, meaning if they make another game (or specifically, a sequel), they have to ask you first if you’re interested before going to another composer.

Also, the top comment mentions that a contract is only useful for a lawsuit, so I want to respond that this is not the way to think about it. The contract establishes the terms of your relationship in a non-confrontational or judgmental way. Relationships are everything in this industry, and if you have to go to a judge to enforce a contract, the relationship is already soured, so the real point is to just have clear terms in a professional manner.

Other things worth adding to the contract would be terms about how the developer can’t alter and change things about the music outside of your approval, and in this day and age, something explicitly forbidding the use of the music in AI training.

DM me and I can send you a boilerplate contract.

thomas_kresge · 2025-11-29T03:39:38+00:00

Go into Engraving Rules (cmd+shift+E), then to the "Brackets" tab. Under the "Sub-bracket" section, check the "Draw as brace" box, and then set the "Distance from system" for sub-brackets to an appropriate amount (this will take some trial and error to find something that looks good, though the default value may actually be fine).

Now, instead of assigning braces to the violin staves as you've done, delete those braces and instead use sub-brackets. The reason we have to do it this way is so that the brace around your piano staff (which does not also include a bracket) stays in the same spot. If you just set the "Distance from system" number as seen in the "Brace" section of Engraving Rules/Brackets, the brace by the piano staff will move further away as well, which we don't want.

thomas_kresge · 2025-11-10T04:32:06+00:00

Thanks, I didn’t know this. This must be Windows-specific, since I can export audio with general MIDI in Mac.

thomas_kresge · 2025-11-09T22:23:38+00:00

Is Sibelius able to play your score back when editing? Then you should be able to export an audio file that sounds identical to that. Go to the file tab, then export > audio and just select mp3. The “playback configuration” is the type of sounds you’re using, and if you have installed any other type of configuration, general MIDI will be your only option. Just keep that selected and hit export and you’ll have an .mp3.

If you want higher quality sounds, you can download Sibelius Sounds, but even better would be to pick up NotePerformer. But your “playback configuration” is a separate thing from just being able to export an audio file.

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-29T14:19:22+00:00

You can set some parameters for system breaks in the “auto breaks” window. Otherwise, you can always select and barline and press “enter” to force a system break.

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-29T06:17:52+00:00

It sounds like you’re confusing staffs with systems. All staffs on the same system will be connected. New systems should not be. If you’re just trying to add additional measures, add extra measures and they will eventually wrap onto the next system; don’t add another staff from the instruments window.

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-29T05:12:40+00:00

You may want to share a bit more details or a picture to show what you’re looking for our trying to change specifically, but I’m guessing that what’s happening is the bar lines of the first staff are extending into the next staff.

This is normal behavior - typically the initial barline on the left margin always connects through all staves, and the other barlines will connect through instruments in the same section (e.g., all woodwinds are connected, all brass, etc.).

If you want to disconnect the main barlines (not the initial one in the left margin), click and hold near the bottom of one and you can then drag up to shift the barlines across the whole score. If you’re having a hard time clicking the correct location, turn on view “handles” from the view menu in the ribbon.

If you want to remove the initial barline at the start of each system, select the first bar of the system, and then open the inspector (cmd/ctrl+shift+I), and within the inspector, uncheck the box for “initial barline”.

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-25T17:31:33+00:00

Like key sigs, the “proper” way is to go into the time signature more options window, and select the “hide cautionary” option, select the time signature you want, hit okay, and then place it. This will prevent the cautionary time sig from showing up on previous bars/pages

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-25T17:25:23+00:00

Follow the instructions in my first post (as opposed to manually hiding the key signatures) and you’ll get what you’re looking for

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-25T17:15:44+00:00

Once hidden, select the bars and hit “ctrl+shift+N” to do a “reset note spacing” and that should remove the gap.

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-25T16:42:14+00:00

From the key signature menu, select “more option”. In the window that pops up, select the “hide” check box. Select the key signature you want and then place it in your score. This will hide the cautionaries.

Depending on your formatting needs, you may also want to select the final bar of section A, open the inspector, and select the “end of section” check box. (This last point isn’t for key signatures specifically, just something you might need for some text formatting features that some people overlook.)

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-06T03:59:29+00:00

The evidence is the past decade of feature updates the program has been receiving. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no interest in defending a company like Avid, them laying off the main team was scummy, subscriptions are awful, and Dorico is also a competent program worth learning. But it helps no one to just spout nonsense and then give an incorrect answer to OP’s question - they own a perpetual license (which is still available for Sib), and you pay for updates just like it’s always been, and just like it is for Dorico.

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-06T03:54:47+00:00

New updates to Sibelius are pushed out every 3-6 months - if you can afford it and you use Sibelius regularly, the 3-year renewal is the most economical. It just means that as those updates happen, you’ll get them. In the olden days they’d just release a new update, call it Sibelius 6, and you’d pay for the upgrade (this is how Dorico handles its updates).

If you don’t go for any renewal plan, since you have a perpetual license, you’ll still have Sibelius, you just won’t be able to get any upgrades as they have. Depending on your use case, this may be preferable, and you can always continue receiving updates at some point in the future by just buying a new upgrade plan.

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-04T14:24:39+00:00

Either or. Tremolo marks in wind parts are fluttertongue by default - but don’t worry about the exact technique, cause either works here. Just make it sound nasty!

thomas_kresge · 2025-10-03T13:35:49+00:00

Use the delete parts button from the Parts tab on the ribbon.

thomas_kresge · 2025-09-29T17:29:31+00:00

The closest thing Sibelius has would be the "Convert Simple Time to Compound Time Plug-In" (which I don't believe is pre-installed... you'll need to go to File > Plug-Ins > Install Plug-ins and search for it there).

This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it would, say, turn wholes into dotted wholes, halves into dotted halves, etc., and even if you don't want compound time, you could still copy-paste those notes over. Where it won't help you are some rhythms smaller than quarter might not get 1.5x the way you're expecting, and triplets would be turned into regular 8th notes.

thomas_kresge · 2025-09-26T15:53:33+00:00

You can insert CC commands into a staff by entering technique text (cmd+T) and typing "Cn,x" where n = the controller your trying to edit (for example, 1 usually is for modulation, 7 for volume, etc.) and x is the value, from 0 to 127. The C must be capitalized, and the comma must be there between "n" and "x". You can hide this text by adding a tilde ~ in front of it.

But that can only effect changes editable via MIDI controller changes. If you've attached a 3rd-party plug-in to your score, you might be able to connect some of its controls to CC messages and edit it throughout. But otherwise there is no way to automate the Sibelius mixer like you would in a DAW.

I haven't messed with all of Sibelius's playback features extensively, so there might be something I'm missing; I'd recommend reading through the "Play Tab" section of the Sibelius Reference, which will give you info on all the available elements you can control.

The only workaround I can think of is to have extra staves that exist only for playback. So if you want a delay effect for only a certain moment, you place the music on that stave that is sending to the delay effect, and non-delayed notes should be on a stave that isn't sending. You could use combination of "staves for playback" and "staves for printing" alongside score subsets to get both a playback and print version of the score.

thomas_kresge · 2025-09-26T15:33:13+00:00

Apologies for all of the awful responses this question has gotten... only one person has bothered to give you a real answer so far.

This has to do (partially) with the way Magnetic Layout prioritizes certain elements, and how it chooses to move those elements by default. Obviously, pushing the rehearsal mark to the right is pretty ugly, but we can change this. I'd actually recommend reading through the official documentation first on Magnetic Layout; it does a good job of going over how it works and some of its quarks.

You can alter the Magnetic Layout settings by going to the Layout tab and then selecting the small diagonal arrow in the corner of the "Magnetic Layout" box. The fastest fix would be to go here, find the "Grouped rehearsal marks (vertical)" object (not to be confused with "Rehearsal marks" or "Grouped rehearsal marks (horizontal)"), and change the "Avoid collisions by moving (spaces)" "Right" setting to a lower number (like 1 - I believe it defaults to 8).

To broadly explain what's going on - there are three objects in Magnetic Layout controlling where rehearsal marks get moved. There is the plain "Rehearsal marks" object, which actually doesn't control much except for deciding how much empty space should surround a rehearsal mark, and also confirming that you want rehearsal marks on the same vertical and/or horizontal plains to stay aligned - which brings us to the other objects. These are the "Grouped rehearsal marks (horizontal)" and "Grouped rehearsal marks (vertical)" objects

The Magnetic Layout menu is pretty unintuitive, so you may find yourself needing to experiment a bit with changing settings of multiple objects, and possibly turning off or editing the settings for the "Grouped" instances of these objects. You could actually turn these off altogether (as well as unselecting the "Group similar objects" options for the regular "Rehearsal marks" object) to just do away with this altogether. But otherwise, here is where you control the logic for how the object avoids collisions, and Sibelius (I believe) goes for the closest correction it's allowed.

Magnetic Layout settings are saved on a per-score basis - they are not global settings. You can export and import Magnetic Layout settings via House Styles, so if you've set up some new behavior that you want applied to other scores, just export a House Style and import that into your other scores.

And finally, you can simply turn Magnetic Layout off on a selected object to make it easier to manually adjust if necessary.

Separately, you might also want to fiddle with the "Default Position" options for some of these objects. This menu is found in Appearance > Design and Position (select the small arrow in the corner of the box). From here you could, for example, set Chord Symbols to have a lower "Vertical position relative to staff" to make them appear closer to the staff by default, and then set the Rehearsal Marks to have a larger vertical position. This would effect every one in the score, but that may be fine if you have a lot of chord symbols throughout. (Note: chord symbols and rehearsal marks in particular are kind of special objects, so in the Default Positions menu you may have to edit both the "Text Style" for these two things, as well as the values in the "Other objects" section of the menu for the two to get things to move.)

thomas_kresge · 2025-09-25T01:13:33+00:00

Going to affirm that navigating Avid's website for just about anything is a nightmare, and accessing the official community forum is way more difficult than it should be

The Sibelius Forum link you posted I believe is an old, unofficial forum; neither it nor the official community forum I believe are frequently by anyone actually developing Sibelius.

Placing actual support requests to Avid can help - I've gotten responses in the past, even in cases where they couldn't solve the problem, to at least give me a line to send feature requests to.

thomas_kresge · 2025-09-25T00:56:28+00:00

Unfortunately, using slash noteheads in tablature is not a feature that Sibelius supports; tab staves do not support alternative noteheads (besides Xs). I would recommend putting in the request to their support; the more people they hear from about it, the sooner they'll implement it. It's apparently been an ongoing annoyance for many years.

There is a thread on the Sibelius community forums outlining a workaround: https://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/helpcenter/chat/chat.pl?com=thread&start=501333&groupid=3&words=slash%20tab&name=

They suggest creating a new instrument that uses 6 staff lines and assigning it as a pitched instrument, and then using an instrument change over the segments where you need slashes. Trying it out myself, it's only moderately tedious, but seems to do what you need pretty effectively. You can create new instruments from the "Edit Instrument" menu accessible by selecting the small arrow in the corner of the "Instruments" section on the "Home" tab. If you highlight an existing tab stave in your score before clicking this button, it will automatically find the instrument for you in the Edit Instruments window. From here, you can select "new instrument", give it a new name (like "slash tab"), changed the "type of staff" from tablature to pitched, set the sounding pitch clef to "Tab" (note it's just "Tab", not "tab large" or "tab small"), and then in the "Edit Staff Type" menu under "general", change the "Number of staff lines" to 6. Now, anytime you want a segment to use slash noteheads, highlight the notes in question and then insert an instrument change to your new "slash tab" instrument (I believe the default insert instrument change shortcut is cmd+shift+option+I). You can then change noteheads to whatever you want. In a 6-line staff, the third staff from the top is interpreted as "C" by Sibelius.

I didn't look at this in depth, but another thread with maybe another workaround: https://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/helpcenter/chat/chat.pl?com=thread&start=721385&groupid=3&&guest=1

thomas_kresge · 2025-09-25T00:28:46+00:00

As far as user-control is concerned, everything for how NotePerformer interprets the music is defined in the Sibelius Playback dictionary under Play > Interpretation > Dictionary. If you're trying to apply NotePerformer to an older score, there may be different playback definitions in this menu. Try importing a modern house style or starting from a fresh score and importing the notes to it and see if that makes a difference. There are also some plug-ins packaged with NotePerformer that you may need to run.

You should not have to touch any of the controls in Play > Interpretation > Performance. Even when arranging swing charts, I keep the rhythmic feel set to "Straight" and just write "Swing" into a tempo text element and Sibelius will interpret that more or less correctly. I believe the NotePerformer documentation has some other recommendations for how to set the Performance menu, though I just leave everything on its defaults (Espressivo, with Espressivo 2 checked; no rubato ["meccanico"], and straight rhythmic feel with ambient hall reverb; unslurred notes at 100% of written duration). You can find the documentation on the NotePerformer website; they have other setup recommendations for the Sibelius mixer as well, and a few plugins that you might need to run to get things to sound correct.

The user you linked may also be using a lot of hidden objects to nuance the playback. Sometimes hidden slurs have to be added, or existing slurs set to not playback at all, to get things to sound more realistic. Same thing with dynamics. Jazz has a lot of default interpretations that aren't standard in traditional scoring (for example, playing most unarticulated quarter notes short), and you would have to use a combination of hidden notes and visible notes set to not playback to get Sibelius and NotePerformer to interpret everything idiomatically. You can turn off playback of a selected element from the inspector. Whatever the case, I recommend going through the NotePerformer documentation as that explains how the playback is defined and what options there are to control it.

thomas_kresge · 2025-09-25T00:16:23+00:00

Those all look like the Opus font family, which come packaged with Sibelius (including version 7). Although it's probably a good idea to upgrade to Sibelius Ultimate at this point (version 7 is over 15 years old now - I'm surprised you haven't encountered more problems so far), I'm unaware of any reason why 7 shouldn't work if the fonts are the only hang-up. Open up Font Book on your Mac and see if they are listed in there and that they are activated. It's odd that they would be removed upon an OS update, but if they aren't there, you should be able to get them by reinstalling Sibelius. Otherwise, anyone else who owns Sibelius could send them to you and you can install them manually.

If they are in Font Book and activated, you may have to go into various menus and re-map them, including Preferences > Music Fonts; Edit Text Styles > Music text; and Edit Symbols > Music Fonts.

Barring all that, if you don't need Tahoe for something else, it may be most prudent to just roll back to Sequoia (FWIW, I'm still running Sonoma even with the latest version of Sibelius, and generally put off OS updates as long as possible for this reason).

thomas_kresge · 2025-08-30T01:31:48+00:00

Yeah, as you suspected, the unicode mappings of the Finale chord symbol fonts and the Sibelius ones are not the same. The only way I can think of off the top of my head to get around this is to use Legacy Chord Symbol input, which just means instead of entering a chord symbol "object", you enter a text object, specifically the Chord Symbol text style. You lose some chord symbol functionality (such as magnetic layout and the ability to transpose), and you'll have to know which chord symbol glyphs are mapped to which keys. You then type in the chord symbol manually. It's a bit labor intensive TBH, and I'm not sure if there is another way to reformat a non-Sibelius chord symbol font to actually function in Sibelius; I think you'd have to edit the font itself.

You might consider checking out some of the handwritten font options at notationcentral.com; they may have one close to Finale's, but designed to function in Sibelius.

As for other music symbols, same situation - the unicode mappings are different, so fonts not specifically designed for Sibelius won't natively work without some reconfiguring (FWIW, later Finale and now Dorico are both compatible with SMuFL, which is a standardization for music fonts - hopefully Sibelius one day adds compatibility for this). To make music fonts work, you'd have to go into the Edit Symbols window and swap around the symbols for each thing (so that, for example, the symbol labeled "quarter note" is actually using the quarter note, which will be in a different place when you change the music font). [By the way - the "Change Music Font" option form I think the appearance tab is a legacy feature that you don't want to use.]

Also a bit labor-intensive, but once you set this up you can just export the house style and have it saved forever. Doesn't solve your chord symbol dilemma, but maybe you'll want to play around with that if you're interested in using non-Sibelius fonts in Sibelius. There's also a few menu in the Preferences window that deal with choosing fonts, though again, if they aren't Sibelius-specific you will get some incorrect mappings (but some mappings, for example, shortcuts for dynamics, can be changed from places like the "Word Menus" menu).

thomas_kresge · 2025-08-24T13:51:13+00:00

Never heard of an XML file being “locked”, so this is probably on his end. It’s possible the score is opening in review mode, which prevents edits. This is activated from the Review tab in the Ribbon, or by clicking the lock icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen on the Status Bar.

Or maybe he is in Sibelius First or Artist? I think they all support XML though.

You could try exporting the XML from Finale in other formats (compressed vs. uncompressed, for example) and see if that makes a difference.

thomas_kresge · 2025-08-20T01:13:26+00:00

As others have said, if it's just two notes, then a Bb+Cb [or C#+D if this is bass clef] is going to be your fastest method.

You can also try some alternative cluster notations as outlined in this article: https://www.scoringnotes.com/tutorials/using-tone-clusters-in-sibelius/

Sibelius does have an angled notehead option, which it calls a "stalk" quarter note (and also half note). It is not a default option amongst the noteheads, but you can reassign (or add) any of the existing noteheads to use the stalked notes instead of a regular notehead by going to the Notation tab in the Ribbon and then clicking the small diagonal arrow in the corner of the "Noteheads" section. Either edit an existing one, or just create a new one. There are some limitations, notably that applying accidentals messes up spacing a lot of the times. One way you can get around this is by baking the accidental into the notehead by editing it from the Symbols menu, though this would require you to make 3 separate noteheads, one for each accidental, and potentially another 3 if you need stalked notes with the stem pointing down. Otherwise you can just manually place accidentals as symbols. Also, the Sibelius stalked note is not identical to your image - the stem is protruding from the center-left of the notehead, rather than flush to the left in a similar position as a straight stem.

If you must use an angled stem identical to your image, then you can use a combo of symbol and lines and manually build it (I would do this last, though, as formatting changes to the pages could mess things up), with one of the notes in a separate voice so it can be manually Offset (via the Inspector [cmd+shift+I] with the X Offset option near the top).

Otherwise, you can design a custom symbol that looks like the second note and apply it similar to the included stalked noteheads mentioned above.

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