Before going further, it is worth revisiting the ways in which you can navigate the score. Broadly speaking, there are two methods. The first is to use the arrow keys to move between notes and rest whilst avoiding other kinds of items, and the second is to use the Tab key to select every item on a staff, one by one, regardless of type.
The order in which items are organised in the score is very important. For example, if you have a dynamic and a note at the beginning of a bar (quarter 1), then the dynamic must come before the note, because the dynamic has to take effect before the note is played. This means that when you use the tab key to move through the score, you will always come to a note after first selecting any other items which are at the same rhythmic position. In fact, the note is always last in the order if there is more than one item at the same point in the score. For example, if a note, lyric, dynamic and technique mark all occur at the beginning of a bar, then the note will be the last item that you come to.
Using the tab key can be quite inefficient, because you may have to work through a lot of items which you don’t need to work on. This means that it is often much easier to use the arrow keys. In fact, you may find that Sibelius runs more quickly when you use the arrow keys. However you still need to know about other items that can affect the notes which you are selecting. For this reason, any item which is near to a note will be described as you use the arrow keys to move through the score.
You can use the verbosity dialog to determine exactly how these items will be described but the default settings, which will be in affect when you first install Sibelius Access) work as follows.
The verbosity dialog allows you to control what information is spoken when you arrow through the score. For instance, if you want to check that every note has the correct articulations, you can choose to have articulations spoken first. You may also decide to not be told the duration of the notes or even there pitches.
These verbosity settings will normally only take affect when you use the arrow keys. This is because you will normally only be using the Tab key to select an item which is not a note or rest and you will need to have more detailed information about this item. Also, remember that when you use the tab key, only the selected item will be described.
The verbosity dialog has a lot of controls and it can take a few moments to work through them all. For this reason, you can save the current configuration as a preset, which you can instantly recall at any time. The controls in the preset section are as follows:
Whenever you change an option in the dialog, a new preset will be created called “modified”. This modified preset will be removed if you press the cancel button, but if you press the OK button it will be kept, even if you reboot your computer. However, if you switch to another preset and change an option in that preset, the modified preset will automatically be overwritten. In other words, a modified preset will be created every time you change an option in the dialog, which will always replace any pre-existing modified preset. The modified preset will always be removed when you save the current configuration.
One important group of verbosity options control how items which are near to the selected note are spoken, such as lyrics, expressions and hairpins. These are all referred to as “nearby items” and are divided into two different groups.
The options which relate to nearby items work as follows:
The order for nearby items combo box controls the order in which nearby items are spoken. There are three options:
Some examples will help to illustrate this. Suppose that there is a time signature, lyric, and whole note at the start of the bar, a hairpin at quarter 3 and a double bar line at the end of the bar.
If “leading – note – trailing” is chosen, the announcement will be:
“Time signature, lyric, note, hairpin, double bar line”.
If “leading – trailing – note” is chosen, the announcement will be:
“Time signature, lyric, hairpin, double bar line, note”.
If “note – leading – trailing” is chosen, the announcement will be:
“Note, time signature, lyric, hairpin, double bar line”.
When the page numbers check box is checked, page numbers will be spoken whilst navigating through the score. The page numbers are always spoken first, regardless of any other verbosity settings. You should also note that the page number is retrieved from the general panel of the properties window.
The highest pitch first check box determines in what order the pitches of notes in a chord are spoken. When it is checked, the pitches are announced from the top down, otherwise they are spoken from the bottom up.
The remaining controls in the dialog refer to the properties of the selected chord, note or rest. For the most part, these options speak for themselves; however the options relating to rhythm and playback properties need a little explaining.
The bar numbers combo box contains four options:
The options in the rhythm combo box are fairly self explanitary, except for the "short messages" option. When this is chosen, the rhythmic announcement is truncated to make it as concise as possible. For example:
“half at 3” instead of “half note at quarter 3”.
There are four checkboxes which control how live playback properties are spoken. These are all turned off in the default verbosity preset however there is a “playback” preset which shows you what these messages are all about. Put simply, live playback properties relate to how individual notes will playback. They are in many ways MIDI data. A more detailed explanation is beyond this topic because it touches on much larger issues. However, you may find that you need these messages if you start down the path of realistic MIDI playback.
This list box, and the up and down buttons which come after it, are used to change the order in which properties are spoken. You should know that live playback properties will always be spoken immediately after the notes that they apply to, and this cannot be changed. Also, you cannot have nearby items spoken in the middle of the properties of the notes. In other words, nearby items will either be spoken before all the note’s properties, or after them, but never in-between.
The reason for this feature is that you may sometimes need to focus on one particular property of the notes in the score. For example, you may need to check all of the articulations in the score. In this case, you would move the "articulations" item up to the top of the list.
You do this by using the arrow keys to select "articulations", and then press the up button. Each time you press it, the "articulations" item will move up one place in the list.
There are plenty of presets which you can make use of but if you decide to create your own preset,
REMEMBER TO SAVE IT!