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.