354: Attaching cresc. and dim. hairpins to a single whole note

This tip is a way to address a fairly common situation where a cresc./decresc. hairpin occurs on a whole note or dotted whole note. Since Sibelius automatically extends hairpins to the next note, the solution is to create a "note grid" using another voice, hiding the grid reference, and then creating your hairpins in that second voice.

• First, choose House Style > Edit Noteheads.
• Find the headless notehead and edit it so that it is silent (headless noteheads play back by default in Sibelius). You can create a new stemless notehead that is silent for this purpose if you are already using the default silent notehead in the piece.
• Enter four quarter notes (at a different pitch to the whole note already in the bar, e.g. something below the staff), then use Shift+Alt+9 or Opt-Shift-9 to convert to headless noteheads.
• Select the notes and move them into voice 2 Alt+2 or Opt-2 and then hide them.
• This gives you an "alignment grid" for any hairpins entered in voice two.
• You may need to switch on View > Hidden Objects while you are working to see the grid and select the stems to start your hairpins and place the dynamics.

The one small caveat is that the spacing by default for these bars with the invisible grid get a little more spread out because of the default engraving rules for spacing in Sibelius, which (correctly) allots more space for 4 quarter notes than it does for one whole note. However, this problem is easily remedied by using Shift+Alt+left arrow or Shift-Opt-left arrow to compress the spacing in these whole note bars a bit if you need to in the extracted parts (normally the spacing is fine in the score since you typically have other note values in other parts).

This article contributed by Robert Puff.