My daughter had to write a piece of music as homework and they were asked, if possible, to use a computer programme rather than write it by hand. I helped my daughter do it on Sibelius (which is what I have on our computer) but came up with the following two problems.

1) She was supposed to put her name on the top left-hand side. I just got her to put her name where the composer's name would go (on the right). When she gave it in her teacher said that next time her name MUST be on the right. How do you do this?

2) They had to write a piece in two parts. The first part was the melody and had to be written for their own instrument. The second part was an ostinato which had to be for one of the other instruments played by pupils in the class. My daughter plays the trombone and she chose to do the ostinato for the flute because her best friend plays the flute. Sibelius automatically puts the flute at the top and the trombone underneath (which actually seems perfectly logical to me). They were told they had to put their own instrument at the top so I wondered if there is any way of swapping them round so that the trombone part is at the top?

My daughter is the only one who plays a bass clef instrument in the class, so is the only one with this particular problem.

She is also likely to be the only one who used Sibelius as it doesn't exist in a French language edition (I know her teacher uses Finale because it exists in French).

You don't mention which version of Sibelius you are using, but hopefully it shouldn't matter too much with regards to your questions:

1) You can either click on and drag the name over to the correct position, or choose Create > Text > Lyricist to get the default left-hand text position on the page.

2) Depending on how the instruments were added to the page in the first place, there's ways of managing this. When creating a new piece, and it asks you which instruments you wish to add, there should be an option to either 'Create Instruments in Staff order' which will put the instruments in their default positions on the system, or you can clear this and use the 'Move Up' and 'Move Down' buttons to place them in an order that suits you better.

On an existing page, if you had created the trombone part first, and then went to Create Instruments, much the same advise applies, although I think that in some earlier versions (up until around version 4), you would be prompted to click where in the score you want the instrument to appear.

To change the position of the instruments once the page is created, go to the Create Instruments window again, and click on the instrument you want to move, and click the move up/move down buttons.

Hope this helps!


Mosschops

Thanks.

It's an ancient version of the first Sibelius which was given to me by someone who had bought a more recent version.

I can't find a move up/move down button for the existing instruments but I have found a box to deselect if I'm starting from scratch, or adding a new instrument so I'll know what to do next time. Her first piece is only 12 bars long so I think I might just delete the flute part and rewrite it in the correct place.

I didn't have much success dragging the text either (I had already tried that) but the lyricist is in the correct place, so in future she can just use that to put her name. (I have so little familiarity with songs that it didn't even occur to me that the lyricist is on the left).