Hey Jim!
I was wondering if you could give a brief overview of how the workflow worked this past (and current season) between Saucedo's  Finale scores and your Sibelius ones. I'm about to be embarking on that with 2 schools this next season, and I'd like to do it in the most efficient way possible. Thanks alot, and tell the green team I said hey!

Matt Jordan
Cavs 03-04

What's up MJ? How are you doing? I'll tell you how I did this. Just get them to send you a MusicXML file of the Finale score. This will convert fairly easily to Sibelius with a minimum loss of information. There will still be some touching up to do as well as pasting everything into the VDL template, but it works all right.

Hi Matt,

Brad touched on exactly how I do this. I use both Sibelius and Finale, so when I get a Finale score from Richard, here are the steps I take to work natively in Sibelius.

Open brass score in Finale
Convert to Music XML, and save.
Open Sibelius, and open the new Music XML file.
Save this imported Music XML file as ";BrassImport.sib"; or something. Keep this file open.
Open my main score template (which includes brass/pit/battery staves with all VDL staff types).

Set all time sigs, rehearsal marks, and key sigs from original brass score into my template. Double check. Then triple check that they're right. Once that's done, I copy/paste the brass staves from the ";Brassimport.sib"; file into my template file. Double check that transpositions are correct and notes are displaying right, and you're good to go!

Hope this helps!

Thanks Jim!  I was curious about this same process as well.

Jim- Thanks so much. That helps alot. Few more questions. How does the revising process work? Also, how does the template hold up from Finale to Sibelius? (for example, co-writing a book with a finale battery and a Sibelius front ensemble) Thanks so much for this forum, it has helped with a ton of my problems!

Matt

Brad- I'm doing great man. Shoot me an email sometime and we'll catch up! [email]mattjordanpercussion@mac.com[/email]

The revising process requires a little more dilligence. By the time I'm done with the percussion book, my score is certainly the most complete so I try to get changes into it as frequently as possible. It's tricky though - once summer hits and things are being tweaked so much by each caption each day, there comes a point where the scores aren't quite accurate, other than lots of pencil markings from both brass/percussion staff.

Template from Finale to Sibelius - I always paste brass music into a pre-formatted template, so there aren't any issues there. Importing battery parts into a Sibelius score that you're writing pit stuff into - that's probably another challenge that I can't easily answer right now. Since pit parts are more chromatic, it may be easier to import those into the Finale battery score, but there will still be areas of non-pitched staff types/staff styles that would be challenging to deal with.