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Sibelius G7

"Designed by guitarists for guitarists"

G7 by Sibelius claims to be the ultimate package for creating, reading, and sharing guitar riffs. We managed to get our hands on a copy to see if it’s any good.

G7 allows you to create musical scores from the on screen designer, imported or shared files, and instruments attached to your PC. You can import ASCII guitar and bass tablature files that you have previously created, received from friends, or downloaded from the internet. You can choose to create with a wide range of instruments (up to 16 at once). After you have finished creating or modifying the score, you may then export it in a number of file formats, such as .sib (g7 files) .html (webpage) .mid (midi file) and .tab (tablature file).

The software features a full compliment of guitar techniques such a bending, slides, and tremolo picking, as well as a full selection of notation, rests, chord symbols, and a wide variety of other configurable text and symbols.

Using the software is very simple. You are presented with a sheet of staves to create your music onto, a standard selection of controls such as open, new, save, print, and zoom in/out. The notes are added by means of a handy floating keypad. This contains all of the notes and symbols that you will need to create some dynamic sounds.

The fretboard, also a floating dialog, is where you can directly add in notes onto the score. I particularly like this as if you are not familiar with pure musical notation; it lets you punch in notes just like you would fret a note on the guitar – a feature I foresee as useful for beginners as well as those just wanting to create riffs quickly.

Navigation around the screen in relation to the pages of music is quite simple. Click and drag on a blank area of the screen to get to the page you want to work on. Alternatively, use the again floating navigation menu to see an overview of the sheets and drag to where you want to get to.

Another feature, albeit a small one, is the inclusion of a "Guitar Guide" from the help menu. This lists several well known guitars such as Fender and Gibson, and also describes the classical, steel string, and semi - acoustic guitars; A nice touch for those new to guitar models and manufacturers.

Moving onto the scorch plug-in. This is a feature that I have found particularly useful. So many sites use either images or a text file to display the lesson tablature / notation. This is all well and good, but how much better is it for a person learning a new riff to actually be able to listen to it as the author intended it? I’ll tell you that it is very useful. The plug-in doesn’t take long to download and register, and than you’re off. The embedded scorch file is absolutely tiny, so no worry of lack of web space or testing the limits of your bandwidth!! The scorch files are very simple to use - you see the tab on-screen, as well as a set of controls to play, pause, stop, rewind, and fast forward the music. What could be easier?

G7 goes much further in that it allows you to add drum tracks to back up your tab, to colour certain elements of the tab – useful for indicating solos, and to limit the maximum stretch when playing along to the tab – very useful in saving sprained wrists!

The CD not only contains the G7 software. Also included is Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 for reading Adobe PDF files, Photoscore Lite that allows you to scan in sheet music onto your PC. Please note that this is a Lite version of Photoscore, and functionality is reduced.  An upgrade path to the Pro version is available. A QuickTime install is also included.

Overall, this is a solid piece of software, easy to use, and with some original ideas such as the scorch plug-in for the web.

What’s In The Box?

• Sibelius G7 CD
• 192 Page Manual
• (Latest Information and Technical Help Leaflet)

Plus / Minus:

• +Easy to use, no steep learning curves, simple well-planned layout
• + Useful Scorch plug-in to allow tab files to be embedded into webpages
• + Small file size so sharing files is easy and fast
• + High degree of functionality
• + The Guitar guide

• - Slow to write out a complete tab file
• - Having to install a browser plugin to view the files. Not everyone will want to do this

Requirements:

Windows
Pentium 133MHz or faster
Win 98 / Me / 2000 / XP
64MB RAM or greater (128MB for Win 200 / XP)
80MB free Hard Disk Space

Mac

G3 / G4 / iMac OS 9.x / OSX (10.1 or later)
32 MB RAM or greater
80MB free Hard Disk Space

Links:

Sibelius G7 Homepage: http://www.g7info.com/site.html

Publishing Homepage: http://www.g7music.net

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