Making it real: Scoring Express Lead Sheets for Dorico and Sibelius

At NYC Music Services and Notation Central, we’re very pleased to announce that Scoring Express 2.0 for Dorico and Sibelius is here, with a fifth suite: Lead Sheets, in versions for both Dorico and Sibelius. Its main purpose: enter a jazz chart once, in one score, and produce concert, B-flat, E-flat, and bass clef versions from the same music.

That addresses a very ordinary problem in jazz publishing and preparation. The trumpet player and tenor need B-flat, the alto needs E-flat, the trombone or bass player may want bass clef, and the pianist wants concert pitch. However those versions are made, keeping several copies of the same chart in sync creates opportunities for mistakes. Fix a chord in three of them and miss the fourth, and someone at the gig has the old version.

The publishing world has dealt with the same problem for years by making separate books. Hal Leonard’s authorized sixth edition of The Real Book, for example, comes in four versions for Volume 1 alone: C, B-flat, E-flat, and bass clef. Same tunes, four books.

The new Scoring Express Lead Sheets suite adds the same transposition machinery directly into the Dorico and Sibelius templates, along with one-staff and two-staves versions in four house styles — plus a lot more.

It’s the first new Scoring Express suite since Choral and Vocal arrived almost exactly a year ago.