Making tuplet fragments in Sibelius
Have you listened to Thomas Adès’ Piano Quintet and now you want to use irrational time signatures? Or did you listen to his In Seven Days and you’re vibing with interrupted tuplets? I’ve just posted a video demonstration of how to create open-ended tuplet lines in Sibelius - you can watch it here, or keep reading for a transcription.
If you work with contemporary music a lot, you’ve probably come across irrational time signatures and split tuplets. These are still fairly new, and there’s no one standard notation for them; some scores will use a closed tuplet bracket over a smaller group (or, indeed, a larger group) of notes, and some will leave a time signature as the only indication. My preferred method, however, is to use an open-ended tuplet bracket to indicate the rhythm has been interrupted. Let me show you how to make this in Sibelius.
Here we have a very important piece of music. We need to make a fragmented triplet bracket for the end of the third bar.
First we’ll create a new text style. Let’s rename it to something appropriate, and we’ll base it on the existing tuplets style. Now if we uncheck all of these options, this style will always be identical to normal tuplets - the only difference we want is to check Erase Background. You may need to experiment with the frame size, depending on the typeface you use.
Uncheck all these options…
But erase the background under the Border tab. You may need to click it twice.
Now we can create the line. Make a new staff line based on Bracket above (start). We’ll rename this too. I prefer to keep my tuplets horizontal, so I’ll check this box. Set the hook to -1 spaces up to match the regular tuplets.
Open Centered Text and choose the new text style you just created. This is a fragmented triplet, so type in “3”. The position will likely need tweaking, I’m setting mine to -0.75 spaces up but you may need to experiment.
Line settings - set the start cap to Hook, -1 spaces up
Centered Text - mine is set to -0.75 spaces up, you may need to experiment with this
Now that’s all done, we can apply our new line style; it should appear under Brackets. Drag this end back and we’ve got our triplet fragment looking good.
There are a couple of drawbacks, however. The first is this line will only work above the staff. We can make a new version for below the staff pretty quickly though, just use it as the basis for a new line and set the hook to +1. Make sure to rename it to something appropriate too. Now that’s nearly there, but it’s still showing above the staff; head to Design and Position and change these values to -4. Reset the position and it will move below the staff, where it can be tweaked.
The second drawback is this line is only for triplets. If you want quintuplets or septuplets or anything else you’ll need to define new line styles based on these. Nevertheless, these are some pretty handy lines to have if you want to write some interesting rhythms.
That's all for this post. If there’s anything you’d like to explore in more detail, or if you have any other questions about engraving you’d like answered, please leave a comment down below. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
