The standard for tenors (at least, in the musical theatre business, and in all classical choir music I've sung) seems to be the treble-8 clef. That's because on the bass clef, tenors' prime range of notes would constantly appear on three or four ledger lines above the staff, which is hard to read and publish (extra paper and ink!). Baritones can go on either staff - but in musical theatre a lot of baris are actually "lyric baritones" or what's referred to as "baritenor", with the same issue - lots of high notes. So that range fits better on the treble-8 clef.
Most singers, who may or may not read music with varying degrees of skill, need to learn notes using a rehearsal recording (often one that's been exported from Sibelius - at least Sibelius suggests this kind of sound export as a valuable feature), and that recording needs to be in their octave.
The basic idea is, Sibelius should match sounding pitch playback of the notes to the way they are notated, and that correspondence breaks down when you change a clef as I did. That is, contrary to what the manual promises, "all the music" did not "shift up or down" to its correct placement on the new staff, when the new clef was chosen - at least in the switch from treble-8 to bass clef. It ends up notated very oddly, on a dozen ledger lines an octave completely above the bass staff, even while the sounding pitches are still coming out correctly. Probably other clef changes (without any 8s) are fine.
Robin points out the oversight is simply that the software isn't "paying attention" to the down-8 or up-8 clef markings, as it does correctly "pay attention" to the 8va or 8vb lines, in order that sounding pitches match the notated pitches.
But as Robin pointed out, there is a workaround, by adjusting the instrument definition (or choosing a different instrument that uses the new clef, as I did).
The clef-switch I tried (from tenor to bari) may not be very frequent, and most instrument definitions seem to be associated with their correct clefs; so presumably that's why the programmers have never bothered to implement recognition of the down-8 or up-8 clefs per se. I suppose I wouldn't bother either, now that I have my fix: an instrument change, not a clef change. It's more of a quirk than a major bug.
--
Alan
|