Sibelius versus Cubase
Composing on Sibelius or Cubase? Here’s the difference.
There are 2 completely different reasons and outcomes for composing on these very diverse programs.
On Sibelius software you are aiming to produce/compose an accurate score which you can play back and print. It is obviously an incredible advantage to be able to hear what you are writing (as opposed to the pencil & manuscript paper method!). However on playback you will hear that the music maintains an ‘exact’ sound of what you have produced –rhythmically correct in bars and sounding somewhat machine like in interpretation.
Of course you will have certain tools at your disposal to enhance the performance-but the performance will always lack anything like what you are used to. Sibelius is the best notation package in the world and is used by professionals and students the world over. Easy to use, very intuitive, clever and does exactly as you would expect-produces first class publishing standard musical scores.
Cubase exists for a totally different purpose. To capture your musical ideas on a sequencer and reproduce performances of your playing-either from a MIDI keyboard or from ‘real’ instruments, such as vocals or flute or guitar -recording them on Cubase audio tracks. From there you would mix your tracks and add effects on the onscreen mixer before producing a final master recording which you would then burn to CD. So now you have a quality recording of your composition, rather than a quality visual score of your creation. That is the basic difference between the 2 programs.
One final thought is the pleasure of knowing that, although these programs are fundamentally different-they can share files-midi files- and this makes using both programs, an unbeatable combination for both sound and vision.
John Montgomery
