Are you using Sibelius First for nota­tion and wish there were a way to cre­ate a time-sav­ing cus­tom tem­plate? Well, pine no more my friend.

Open Sibelius, cre­ate a new file, and design it how­ev­er you’d like. Here I’ve made a basic slash nota­tion lead sheet with a four-bar system:

Save this file some­where acces­si­ble and name it some­thing use­ful. I named this one ​“Basic Chart.sib” and saved it to the desktop.

Next, quit Sibelius, open the Find­er, find Sibelius in the ​“Appli­ca­tions” fold­er, right/­con­trol-click on it, and select ​“Show Pack­age Contents”:

Nav­i­gate to Contents/Resources/[your language].lproj/Manuscript Paper. (In my case, Contents/Resources/en.lproj/Manuscript Paper.) All of Sibelius’s tem­plates are stored here in the usu­al .sib for­mat. Cre­ate a new tem­plate cat­e­go­ry if you’d like, and drag your new tem­plate into the fold­er. You will like­ly be asked to authen­ti­cate this action, just enter your pass­word if prompt­ed. In this case, I’ve cre­at­ed ” My Tem­plates,” where the lead space is a hack to get it to appear first in alpha­bet­i­cal order:

After that’s done, restart Sibelius. You’ll see your new tem­plate in the tem­plate chooser:

That’s all there is to it! This lit­tle hack has saved me tons of time; hope­ful­ly you’ll find it use­ful as well.