reference.book Page 169 Monday, August 31, 2009 2:47 PM
2.26 Percussion
Different staves for different instruments In orchestral scores, it’s common to use a different one-line staff for each unpitched percussion instrument used, like this:
Notations A wide range of individual percussion instruments is accessible from the Create Instruments dialog. For example, to notate a bass drum, cymbals and triangle in your score: In the Create Instruments dialog, choose the Percussion/Drums family and add Cymbals,
Triangle and Bass drum instruments Click Create and the instruments are added to your score. All of these instruments play back automatically with the correct sound. Notice how stems on 1line staves point upwards.
Creating your own drum map If you want to write multiple percussion instruments on the same staff using sounds, noteheads or staff positions that aren’t defined in any of the built-in instruments, you will need to create your own instrument with its own drum map. For example, if you want to write:
Choose House Style Edit Instruments From the Common instruments ensemble, select the Percussion and Drums family, then
select Drum set (basic) from the Instruments in family list. (It doesn’t really matter which instrument you choose, as we’re going to edit it in a moment anyway, but we’ll choose this one because it has the right number of staff lines, and not too many existing noteheads in its drum map.) Click New Instrument, and answer Yes when asked if you want to create a new instrument based on this one Change Name in dialogs to something like Bass drum, Cymbal, Triangle, so you’ll be able to find it again later Change Full name in score to something like Bass drum\n\Cymbal\n\Triangle (\n\ tells Sibelius to put the next word on a new line) Click Edit Staff Type, and go to the Percussion tab in the dialog that appears In our example we need only three pitches on the staff to be mapped to particular sounds: we’ll use the top line for the triangle, the middle line for the cymbals, and the bottom line for the bass drum; select each of the other unwanted pitches and click Delete to remove them 169