Focus Families

Added 17 Jul 2009 (last updated 17 Jul 2009)

For use with Sibelius 5 and Sibelius 6

The Focus Families plugins let you display, in Focus On Staves, instruments contained in one or more families of instruments. The families are predefined by Sibelius and are: "Brass", "Exotic", "Fretted", "Keyboard", "Other", "Pitched Percussion", "Singers", "Strings", "Unpitched", and "Wind".

Use Focus Families (and its 2 clones, Focus Families 1 and Focus Families 2) to display multiple instrument families. These plugins bring up a dialog, at least the first time run in a session, and save their settings across Sibelius sessions.

There is also a set of plugins that will display one family of instruments. These have no dialog, and are meant to be assigned to shortcut keys. They are Focus Brass, Focus Exotic, Focus Fretted, Focus Keyboard, Focus Other, Focus Pitched Percussion, Focus Singers, Focus Strings, Focus Unpitched, and Focus Wind.

All instruments are in one family only. So for example, though you can find a Harp in Create > Instruments in both the Strings and Pitched Percussion families, the plugin will always place a harp in Pitched Percussion.

While these plugins are less customizable than the Focus Set plugins, they do not require setup for each score, and so can be mixed and matched with the Focus Set plugins.

It is recommended that these plugins be installed into a separate user Plugins subfolder (e.g., Focus Families). A PDF help document is included in the zip file.

• Download FocusFamilies.zip (180K, downloaded 586 times)

Plug-in written by Bob Zawalich.