Just curious--I have the modwheel changes working well to use rolls in the pitched percussion instruments, but I'd also like to mark them with tremelos for notation's sake.  Is there a way to do this and not have sibelius interpret them for playback?  There may be a housestyle setting I'm missing for this, but I would think disabling them score-wide would cause headaches in the battery writing.

Justin

This is a good question Justin. The way I usually deal with this (though not notationally beautiful), is to simply attach a trill ";tr"; SYMBOL to these occurances. It looks a little old-school, and isn't technically acurate (since a trill would indicate something different), but it's an easy workaround if you're in a hurry. Since Symbols (shortcut = Z) do not affect playback, it's a way of attaching a hint that will at least tell the performer what your intentions are.

In a perfect world, a future version of Sibelius would allow staves to set up whether or not normal slash notation plays as rolls or not. Automatic diddle playback is great for battery parts, but not necessarily for marimbas/timpani/etc.

If your notation has to be pristine, I'd suggest adding an ossia staff above the primary staff, and make your ";ugly"; notation a part of the ossia staff, make the main staff pretty, and MUTE the main staff in the mixer. When it comes time to print your score, select only the ";pretty"; staves that you want to see in your printed score, (alt-click or command-click for macs) then click the FOCUS ON button which will then only display those staves.

A pretty good workaround to this (as suggested by someone in the Sibelius chat room) was to input the note with the tremolo and then uncheck the ";Play on pass' for 1 (or 2, 3 if it's repeated) so that the note isn't played by Sibelius, and then add a hidden note with the modwheel change so that the roll sound is played during playback.  Not too time-consuming and will present mallet rolls in a notation players are used to seeing.

[quote author=Justin Belcher link=topic=688.msg2772#msg2772 date=1121105293]
A pretty good workaround to this (as suggested by someone in the Sibelius chat room) was to input the note with the tremolo and then uncheck the ";Play on pass' for 1 (or 2, 3 if it's repeated) so that the note isn't played by Sibelius, and then add a hidden note with the modwheel change so that the roll sound is played during playback.  Not too time-consuming and will present mallet rolls in a notation players are used to seeing.
[/quote]

Great suggestion Justin. Adding the hidden note, are you doing that in a different voice? I've sometimes written ";tr"; symbols (to indicate a roll, but symbols don't playback), but as you already said, players are more accustomed to seeing slash notation. Maybe I'll start trying it this way as the ";ossia staff"; method get's pretty messy if you're doing it for several marimba parts at once...

I can imagine that'd be a pain :-).

Yes I'm using a different voice to get this done.�� It's actually pretty snappy if you do the following.

1.) Input the note and the modwheel change for the roll first (the one you actually want Sibelius to trigger the sample with)
2.) Hit Option-2 (win: Alt-2) to push that note to the 2nd voice (this also creates a lot of rests that you need to hide too)
3.) Select the measure
4.) Hit Cmd-Option-Shift-2 (win: Ctrl-Shift-Alt-2) to filter the selection to only the 2nd voice
5.) Hit Cmd-Shift-H (win: Ctrl-Shift-H) to hide all the 2nd voice notes and rests
6.) Go back to your measure and input the same note with a tremolo in the 1st voice and disable the ";Play on pass"; for whatever iteration is appropriate.

Seems like a lot of steps but it goes by really quick and I think it's already a lot quicker than using the ossia method.

I've tried this in Sibelius 4 and it doesn't seem to work. I can get everything to hide okay, but the play back is still with the tremolo. Is there any new feature in Sib 4 that can help?