Sibelius: Joining Staves For A Cappella

Hey YC,

Sibelius 6 question:

I'm doing an a cappella arrangement, and just for the intro, I have five systems: Sopranos (two staves: soprano 1, soprano 2), Altos (two staves: alto 1, alto 2), Tenors (two staves: tenor 1, tenor 2), Baritone, and Bass. For the rest of the piece, I want a more traditional layout, with four one-staff systems (SATB). What is the best way to do this? I've already done the system breaks. I know that one way to do it is to use the "hide empty staves" tool, but because you can't use that tool in panorama, wouldn't I have to do that for 3 staves on every page? Thanks for your help!

jbhartov

It's because for the intro to the piece, I have each voice part (1s and 2s) doing different rhythms and different syllables, and so I thought it would be much easier for the performers to read if I split the parts for that section (I was also under the impression that you can't write two sets of syllables to be sung simultaneously on one staff)

Switching from one to two staves can sometimes have advantages when it comes to page layout. My advice would be to create two staves but switch to using 2 voices on a single stave when the parts are rhythmically very similar. Otherwise stick to two when there are differences in word-setting. Sibelius comes with some handy arrows on the symbols menu which you can use to indicate splits in staves.

just use the hide empty staves tool, you can just select all rather than going page by page. it'll look messy in panorama but scores don't print out that way anyway.

thank you all for your advice! you were all very helpful. i'm not sure if i'm going to stick with just one staff for each voice for the whole thing or split like i originally wanted to, but the select-all approach should've been more obvious to me (my bad, .fseventsd--thanks for that)

this is a great forum and i hope to read/write a lot more here. thanks again

If there are five distinct parts then by all means split them up. If it is only occasional divisi or primarily mono-rhythmic divisi, keep them together.