Teaching with Sibelius

Enables students to hear their compositions
Helps teachers prepare lessons more quickly
Comes with 1000s of worksheets and ideas

How will Sibelius help me?

Sibelius is suitable for all educational levels – it’s easy for beginners, yet sophisticated enough for all university requirements. Special discounted educational pricing and site licenses are available.

Sibelius helps teachers with preparing teaching materials and arrangements. It lets students hear how their work sounds, makes it easy to find and correct mistakes, and is much more fun to use than pen and paper!

At university level, Sibelius satisfies the most advanced requirements, from avant garde and early music notation to Schenkerian analysis.

If you’re an instrumental teacher, Sibelius makes it quick to create exercises, scan in and transpose pieces, and produce accompaniments and arrangements – you’ll never need to write out parts again!

Case studies »

Ideas Hub

Over 2000 ready-made ideas are included for students to use, in a huge range of styles from classical, jazz and band to world music, rock and hip-hop. By using these ideas in their music, students of all abilities can discover how melodies, harmonies and rhythms can be put together to create differing textures and musical structures.

They could start with just one or two ideas for inspiration, or alternatively use ideas as building blocks to create a complete piece. You can keep track of what they’ve done, because Sibelius marks where ideas are used in the score.

If you prefer, you can switch off all of the ready-made ideas, or just give students a few specific ones, for more focused exercises.

Watch movie: Ideas Hub »

Worksheets

Sibelius's Worksheet Creator lets you produce over 1700 different ready-made worksheets, exercises, projects, songs, instrumental pieces, posters and other resources, suitable for students at all levels.

Watch movie: Worksheets »

Internet studying

With Sibelius, you can put coursework onto your school/university web site or our special site SibeliusEducation.com for students to view, play, print and save to disk. SibeliusEducation.com also provides additional teaching materials and resources from other educators and from Sibelius Software.

Sibelius comes with free-time limited access to GroveMusic.com, the Internet version of the world's leading music encyclopedia.

Video

Sibelius lets you compose to any video file - ideal for student multimedia projects. You can view the video side-by-side with the score, and they're always kept in sync so you can see what's happening in the video at any point in the music and vice versa. More advanced features such as timecode and hit points make it easy to make your music fit with important events in the action.

Sibelius comes with a variety of short videos to compose to - from Charlie Chaplin to Mr Bean. You can get further ones from SibeliusEducation.com, or download trailers and adverts to write to from many other web sites.

Watch movie: Working with video »

Arranging & transposing

The Arrange feature saves hours of time in creating arrangements and keyboard reductions. It’s also ideal for students who are learning arranging, composition or even orchestration.

Transposing is another great time-saver for putting pieces into suitable keys, and adjusting exercises for different instruments or abilities.

Create exercises, worksheets and handouts quickly

Playback

When playing, Sibelius selects the right instrumental sounds, reads markings straight from the score and adds expression, so students get a realistic rendition of their music right away. And they can check for mistakes, just by listening. (read more)

You can also use Sibelius to play aural tests, accompaniments, and even create CDs and MP3 files of your music.

Watch movie: Playback »

Watch movie: Sibelius Sounds Essentials »

Color & graphics

Notes which are too high/low are shown in red; you can adjust instrument ranges to write for players of different abilities. Music can be hidden, so students can fill in an exercise on computer and then reveal the right answer.

Sibelius lets you add color, pictures and graphic notations to coursework; lots of graphics are included. You can also take music from Sibelius into word processors and graphics packages, for creating worksheets, posters, etc. in other programs.

Watch movie: Graphics & Color »

Watch movie: Exporting graphics »

Sibelius includes dozens of graphics
to add to worksheets and scores
– or use your own instead

Plug-ins

Sibelius includes many educational plug-ins, to automate tasks such as writing note names and beats above notes, creating sets of scales and arpeggios, adding brass/string fingering and tonic sol-fa, and identifying motives for musical analysis.

School features

Students find Sibelius so much fun to use in the classroom that they sometimes play around with it instead of getting on with their work! So you can switch off all of the advanced features with a couple of clicks, leaving only the main things students need for coursework.

You can also turn individual features on/off, and create your own sets of features for different classes - e.g. if you're teaching how to transpose by hand, you can stop students transposing it automatically!

Sibelius multi-user options

Our licencing solutions have been designed specifically for secondary schools, and we provide full technical support to help you get up and running with Sibelius in your classrooms and labs.

Network licence

You can install Sibelius on every networked computer in the school and only pay for the number you need to use at any one time. So you can teach using Sibelius in any different rooms in the school. Replacing computers, upgrading copies of Sibelius and tracking licences is also made easy.

Stand-alone

Stand-alone copies can only be used on the specific machines they have been installed on. But you can install one out of every five copies off-site, for example at a Music Teacher’s home.

Sibelius Student

Sibelius Student is a special version of Sibelius designed for students to use for homework. It has just the features students need, but is compatible with the full Sibelius program - so they can work on the same piece at home and at school. For more details click here.

Watch movie: Sibelius Student Edition » (Flash, 890K)