Getting on the same page

Opening someone else’s notation file can take a little detective work. So can opening your own file from a year ago. After two 90-minute Q&A episodes, Philip Rothman and David MacDonald return for a (slightly) shorter conversation about figuring out what’s going on in a score before you start changing it.

David brings questions from helping his students; Philip brings his experience exchanging files with composers, clients, and colleagues. We start with the messages that appear when a file opens. There may be something useful in that dialog you just dismissed! Missing fonts, in particular, deserve a look before “OK fatigue” takes over.

Once the file is open, what are you actually looking at? A concert-pitch score or a transposed one? Where did that instrument go? We talk about making hidden information visible in Sibelius and Dorico, and checking whether a setting applies to one item, one part, or much more than you intended. Text styles, wildcards, and tokens get some attention, as do the various ways of showing the same music in different scores, parts, and layouts.

David describes a “fragile file”: change one thing, and something elsewhere breaks. That prompts a discussion of when to use the software’s more sophisticated features and when a simpler setup might be easier for a collaborator to manage. We also look at what to include when sending a file, from comments explaining an unusual choice to a reference PDF showing how it’s supposed to look, and the proofreading checks that can help before it goes out the door.

There’s plenty here for students — but we’re all students here.

Have you solved a notation problem whose cause surprised you? Tell us in the comments, or at podcast@scoringnotes.com. It may make it up the pneumatic tubes from the mailroom to the C-suite.

Products mentioned

Notation software

Sibelius (Avid)

Dorico (Steinberg)

Plug-ins for Sibelius

Check Redundancies (Roman Molino Dunn), included with Sibelius in Review > Plug-ins > Proof-reading