329: Braces - making braces appear in the middle of a system

In some scores, e.g. music for organ, or 'cut-away' scores in which instruments are re-introduced in the middle of the page, you may need to create a brace in the middle of a system. To do this:

  • Assuming the brace occurs at a barline, select the bar after this barline (as a 1-bar passage)
  • Open the Bars panel of the Properties window, and increase Gap before bar very slightly wth the arrows (e.g. to 0.03 or 0.06) until a brace appears. (This effectively creates a divided system, like a coda, but with a minuscule gap.)
  • In the same panel uncheck Initial barline and Clefs
  • You will probably need to move the first note left to close the gap where the clefs would have gone: drag it as far left as it will go, then with the note still selected decrease X in the General panel of the Properties window until it is correctly positioned. (Simiarly for any note/rest at the start of the bar in the left hand.)
  • Finally, drag the second note leftwards until the gap between the first two notes is normal.

Note that in a 'cut-away' score, if some instruments were already playing at the point at which some braced instruments are reintroduced, any brackets and/or braces that apply to the instruments already playing will reappear, which is undesirable. To fix this, define one or more new staff types based on the staff types used by those existing instruments, switching off the Draw brackets option in the Edit Instruments or Edit Staff Type dialog (see Edit Instruments or Edit Staff Types in your User Guide for more details on this procedure), and use these new staff types for the continuing instruments at the point where the braced instruments reappear.

Details

Product
Sibelius
Versions
affected
2 - 2.11, 3.0 - 3.1.3, 4.0 - 4.1, 5.0 - 5.2.5, 6.0 - 6.2, 7.0 - 7.1
Changed
24 Sep 2008

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