James Humberstone

Avid released their first iPad app only a few weeks ago, and it’s for my favourite ever software title – Sibelius. In fact, Avid Scorch is much, much more than a Sibelius file-reader for iPad. If it weren’t enough to be able to read and play back your Sibelius files, what about being able to perform some score-wide edits, like balancing the playback of the instruments in a mixer, or transposing a score to fit the range of your voice? You can change the tempo (perfect for practicing parts directly from the iPad with playback – more on that in a minute), view the notes being played on an interactive keyboard, change the font, the look and feel, and use a unique music-stand view which leaves you with the music and nothing else, so you can easily play along right from the iPad screen. And you can change the instrument of the staff you’re looking at – even from traditional notation into guitar tab or vice-versa! Read Daniel Spreadbury’s take on it here.

Now this is a cool tool for anyone who does their own compositions or arrangements in Sibelius. Your whole library can now be shared on the iPad, and I’m really interested in what the applications might be for teachers and students in schools who have bought class sets of iPads. Yes, those of us suitably inclined probably rather like the idea of taking our stage band on tour with their whole parts library on an iPad each. Need to change the set list at the last moment? No problem, you can drag the scores on your virtual shelves into any order! But if you don’t already use Sibelius, and therefore have lots of music in Sibelius format ready to go, you needn’t worry – Avid have thought of that, too. Scorch comes with a built in Store, where you can download literally thousands of scores ready-to-go, many of them free of charge.

But the focus of this article is to think about how we might use Avid Scorch for iPad in the classroom. I’ve been playing around with adapting my own Sibelius files for the iPad to create rehearsal parts for students to practice with at home, as my first idea to share. So imagine this: you have written an arrangement for your stage band, it has some pretty tricky syncopation and notes high in range, and you’ve got 2 weeks to learn it. Your students take their parts home on school-loaned iPads (or download to their own personal iPads at home), open their part and play along with it. But rather than hearing just their part, they hear the rest of the band, and they fill in their own part (band-karaoke!). Of course, while they’re learning, they can slow the tempo down, play from the point they keep getting stuck at, and so on. Here’s how I’ve achieved that:

As a sample I’ve used an excerpt from my 2004 piece Jabberwock. This was a fairly crazy setting of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” for combined school concert band and stage band and MLC School premiered it at the Sydney Opera House. You can watch a video of the performance and download the full score (which is also included in Sibelius’ Worksheet Creator, FWIW) here.

You can download the excerpt from the score, so far not edited for iPad to play around with yourself by clicking here (further down you can download the same score iPad-optimised).

The process to take the score onto the iPad is easy once you’ve done it once. And to make it even easier I’m providing House Style files you can download so you don’t even need to go through all these steps if you don’t want to or you’re in a hurry.

In Sibelius, I’ve opened the excerpt from the original score. The page size for both score and parts is set to A4. If you try opening this in Scorch you’ll see that the dimensions of the iPad screen are wider and shorter than the A4 page, and your staff sizes are probably set quite small, meaning that while you may be able to read them, you might struggle to perform from them. If you change the page setting to the US Letter standard size those dimensions work better on iPad, but you can get even better ones which will fit exactly when in Music Stand mode.

In Sibelius, go to Layout > Document Setup and change the sizes to the ones you see to the right, including margins. Once you’ve done this, go to Layout > Optimize Staff Spacing in case it has created any clashes between the staves in the score. Review your score, and if staves seem too close or too far apart, make the Staff size bigger or smaller by going back to Document Setup.

Next, you should open the parts Window (Window > Parts). Click on the Multiple Part Appearance button, and under Document Setup set the same values by choosing “Same as score” under both Page size and staff size, and then clicking the Margins button to edit the margins. Again, review the parts as you usually would, looking for clashes and considering making the staff size bigger, especially for younger players. You can download the Jabberwock score here with these dimensions set up and see how nicely it works. Once you’re in the score, just click on the parts list, press play, and you should hear the whole band playing while you play your part. Open the mixer and mute your part to play karaoke-style!

If changing all those values in Sibelius seems a little complicated, you can make it easier by using the House Styles I’ve created to do it quickly – download them here and here. For instructions on how to import them into Sibelius, go to the Help menu, open the Sibelius Reference, and read page 656 under “User-editable files”. Once you have imported them successfully, in your score go to House Style > Import House Style and choose iPad as seen on the left. As before, run Layout > Optimize Staff Spacing and check your score for any resulting clashes, then go to Multiple Part Appearance in the Parts Window and this time click on the House Style tab, then click the Import House Style button and choose the iPad parts House Style. A quick proofread of your parts and you’re ready to go!

There will be a whole host of other things you could do with Avid Scorch in the classroom. Let’s consider how useful the transpose feature is for vocalists needing to sing in-range. Or what about score study for senior students? Delivering folders of scores to students using Dropbox? Composition progress diaries online with linked Sibelius files for reading in Scorch (if you’re reading this blog on your iPad, you should be able to open the linked Sibelius files in Scorch seamlessly). Comment below!