Trills/Glissandos!?

A warning to all ye who read this: This is gonna be a post full of roundabout explaining of a technique with little to know useful terminology whatsover so apologies in advance!

You see, listening to various pieces I notice little bit that sound like glissanods, played usually on a harp but sometimes a flute or other instruments. Its basically a very quick run up and down a large number of notes and usually doesn't take any loger than a beat.

If you have any suggestions as to a) what it is I'm thinking of and more importantly b) how to write these features in sibelius, that's be brilliant help! I've tried typing in "really quick run of notes feature thing" into google and surprisingly I havn't had any decent results! :thumbsup:

On a harp, piano, celeste, etc. that would be a glissando. You should look up in an orchestration book the ways of notating this.

However, if you want something for something such as a wind or a string player, then writing glissandi would normally be a slide from note to note. I assume that you are talking about some sort of tuplet that happens on one beat like in the example that I am posting.

There's a few strict rules in creating tuplets in music engraving that Sibelius follows. Let us say that you want to create a 3 tuplet on 2 quarter notes. Since 3 is less than 2 added to itself (2+2 = 4) then it will be notated using quarter notes. If you wanted to a 3 on 1 beat, then it will be notated with eighth notes because 3 is greater than 2. This can go even further. Doing an 11-tuplet on 3 beats will be in eighth notes because 11 is less than twice the subdivision of the quarter notes (which would be 6. 6+6 = 12. 12>11) However, if it was a 13-tuplet on 3 quarter note beats, it would be done in sixteenth notes, because 13>12.

Why is this important? Because you're going to have to tell Sibelius the right type of beat to use when you try to create your tuplet. To do this is Sibelius, simply choose the note value that you need and place it on the staff where you want the tuplet to start, then use Create>Tuplet and insert the number of notes the tuplet will have (if it has less than ten, you can do this by pressing Ctrl/Apple + the number in the number row.) You can also do things such as 7:6 (that would be 7 notes in a 6 beats, but you can look into these things later.) After that, the tuplet should be created, and you should be able to enter the rest of the notes into your tuplet. The reference manual also has more on things you can do with tuplets.

I must admit it took me ten readthroughs to understand what you were getting at BUT....

It worked! Once I figured it out I tried it quickly on Sibelius with a piccolo I happened to have handy and it worked like a dream so thanks for that!