The Scoring Samurai is a blog about what it actually takes to do serious orchestral work at a professional level—not just the craft, but the whole ecosystem. The tools that remove friction. The habits that protect the hours. The philosophy that keeps you at the desk when nothing is urgent and everything feels far away. Written by a working orchestrator for anyone who takes the work seriously.
Don’t Bow Out: Mastering Bowing Input with Automation in Sibelius
I recently found myself in a situation as rare to an orchestrator as Halley’s Comet to the human eye: I was tasked with putting bowings into the parts. Mind you, I already had the bowings from a previous performance, so all I needed to do was input them for the next one. The catch? Everything had to be done in the same Sibelius file as the score, and the score already contained some bowings—added at the orchestrator’s discretion. That meant I needed a (smart) way to insert a whole lot of symbols that could be easily hidden in the score.