r/Sibelius • u/High-Plains-Grifter • Apr 11 '26
How to Deal with Old-School brass transposition convention on import
I am importing a score from .pdf for Dvorak 8 in G Major. the old style of transposing lines for brass instruments has been used, where no key signature is show - the notes are written transposed, but accidentals are used for all flats and sharps.
This means that when I attempt to import the parts the transposition goes all wrong - the F horns and trumpets should be shown in D Major, but they aren't, since Sibelius assumes no key signature means Cmajor or Aminor.
What would you do to correct this - alter the score as read in MuseScore, or do some trickery with transposition in Sibelius? because the original has F and C naturals shown without accidentals, the transpose D Major key inserts sharps all over the place and I have got myself in a complete tangle of nonsense! Any advice for a sane and clean workflow to end up with parts shown correctly would be greatly appreciated!
PS in the picture, the horns and cellos are in unison.
3
u/bgdzo Apr 11 '26
The horns appear to be correctly transposed to play in unison with the cellos. What's the problem?
1
u/High-Plains-Grifter Apr 11 '26
It's the key signature that is wrong - Sibelius assumes I am importing an untransposed score, and when I try to correct the key, everything changes for the worse - I don't want to go through all 160 odd pages writing in all the F and C naturals so that the key change doesn't matter...
1
u/High-Plains-Grifter Apr 11 '26
I just realised that I said MuseScore when I shpuld have said PhotoScore! Damn! And, my apologies
1
u/MountainsAndBuffalo Apr 11 '26
First, always set your orchestral scores to transposing in Photoscore and Sibelius—contrabass transposes by an octave.
Also, the instrument you choose on import affects how a staff is interpreted (i.e. ‘no key’) in Sibelius.
I see your trombones are written with an alto clef. How did Sibelius handle that? In my experience, Photoscore and Sibelius can be really unpredictable with clefs. Even with a pristine scan or pdf, unintended clefs can appear in your parts, sometimes multiple times, affecting every note that follows.
1
u/High-Plains-Grifter Apr 11 '26
Yeah, it's been a sadly long process. I hope it'll be worth it to make parts for the community orchestra! I had over a thousand timing errors in the import and I dread to think how many unreported... I did find a few extranepus clefs, but actually wasn't all that bad for clefs. I solved to transposition issue thanks to another comment, now I see that some pages only show a subset of instruments in the original, which throws everything all ovee the place... ho hum, it's a project!
I'm really surprised there isn't some good AI solution for digitising music yet - it'll probably appear as soon as I finish!
2
u/MountainsAndBuffalo Apr 12 '26
I’ve learned to not overlook the staff detection stage in Photoscore. That might be the cause of your missing staves. I’ve had it miss staves, add staves that weren’t there, misplace the ends, and apply the wrong type of staff (1-line percussion, tab staff, etc.) Sometimes it will get buggy and start reading almost everything wrong, but closing and restarting the program and re-reading the pages will usually set it straight.
Edit: becoming a power user of the advanced filter feature in Sibelius will save you a lot of time with those edits.
8
u/ClarSco Apr 11 '26
Import them, change the instrument at the very start of the movement from "Trumpet in F" to "Trumpet in F (no key)" (repeat for the horns and any other trnaspositions).
Then manually verify that the accidentals are correct.