How Do I Increase The Notehead Size In Sibelius Ultimate Update 2022

How do i increase the notehead size in sibelius ultimate, make certain noteheads smaller or larger in finale or sibelius. All about sheet music and technology. One of our discussions was finding a way to make certain noteheads appear slightly smaller or larger in Sibelius.

Finale

This task is fairly easy in Finale, so let's start there. Just select a passage and run the Resize Noteheads plugin found in Plugins > Edit Notes, Beams and Rests.

For example, say you want to change the root note of a chord to a certain percentage (say 59%). Run the plugin and enter the following settings in the dialog:

The result would be:

I could have used the Resize Tool to click on individual notes, or run Jari Williamsson's JW Change plugin to do the same.

Sibelius

Sibelius has more restrictive default options. There is a small notehead style that can be used, but the percentage cannot be easily changed. Still, it's better than nothing, so let's explore it first.

Select a passage and filter the notes you want to change. In this example, to filter the lowest notes, go to Home > Filters > Bottom Notes or Single Notes. To change the size of the noteheads for these notes, go to Notation > Noteheads > Type and select Small from the gallery.

This might be enough, but what if you want a very specific percentage reduction?

First go to Text > Styles > Edit Text Style and select Generic Symbols. Click New Text Style... and click Yes, create a new text style that will copy my settings.

Give the new text style a logical name, such as Shared Symbols (Individually Small). I randomly want my custom style to be 59% of the default size. Sibelius' default size is 19.5 pt. 59% is 11.5 pt. This is what you enter for both size and part size.

Once you’ve done that, close out of the dialogs, and move on to the next step, which is to create custom symbols that can be used in a custom notehead style. Go to Notations > Symbols > Edit Symbols. Click New…

Name this new symbol Quarter note (custom small). Select your freshly made Common symbols (custom small) text style from the Music font list, and then select the quarter notehead (or enter 207 where it says Number:).

Click OK and repeat the process for half noteheads, full noteheads, and double full noteheads. (The corresponding symbol numbers are: Half = 250; Whole = 119; Double Whole = 87.)

If all goes well, you'll have a nice collection of "custom small" noteheads in your custom category of symbols. I can do it. Dialog:

Now, it’s time to define a custom notehead style that uses these symbols. Go to Notations > Noteheads > Edit Noteheads and click New…

Let’s be consistent and name our new notehead style Custom small. Select the quarter note and click Change Symbol… and choose our nice new Quarter note (custom small) from the User-defined category.

Do the name for the other noteheads, and you should have a dialog that looks like this:

Click OK, then click Close. Now you can finally use this new notehead style. Uhu!

As we did at the beginning of the Sibelius section of this tutorial, select a passage and optionally filter the notes you want to change. In this example, to filter the lowest notes, go to Home > Filters > Bottom Notes or Single Notes. To change the notehead size of these notes to the newly created style, go to Notation > Noteheads > Type and select Custom Small at the bottom of the gallery .

Here’s the result:

In Steve's case, what he really wanted to do was create a few noteheads that were slightly smaller than standard size (around 95% or so) to allow a little more space around the notes. If he only needs one of these custom sizes in the document, he doesn't have to go through this whole process again.

Go to Text > Styles > Edit Text Styles and select the General Symbols (Custom Small) text style you created. Change the score and part point size to something else. For example, 95% of the default size of 19.5 pt is 18.5. You can freely change specific noteheads using Notation > Noteheads > Type > Custom Small. Here is before (100%) and after (95%):

Creating your own notehead sizes in Sibelius isn't for the faint of heart, but once you've created them, you can export them as custom styles (View > Custom Styles > Export) and import them into any document .

Or here's a nifty trick:

You don't even need to export the house style. Simply copy passages with custom noteheads and paste them into another document. All relevant custom symbols and text styles from the source are transferred to the target document. Here you can read our article about How To Create Atak Data Packet 2022.