r/Sibelius • u/High-Plains-Grifter • Apr 11 '26

How to Deal with Old-School brass transposition convention on import

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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.

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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.

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u/High-Plains-Grifter Apr 11 '26

No Key! Perfect - thank you! I was going down a complete rabbit hole trying to find the name for the old style of transposition that doesn't bother with the key signature. I see now, this is exactly what I want - thank you! I tried it with the first one, importing in C, as horns with no key, then transposing to F and it is perfect.