MIXER

The mixer window gives you control over how the instruments in your score will playback. Any changes which you make to the mixer will have no affect on the score itself, although the mixer settings will be saved with the score.

Opening and moving to the mixer

You must first open the mixer by pressing Ctrl+Alt+M. A message will be spoken to tell you that the mixer has opened. If the keystroke doesn’t work, just press Alt+W to open the window menu and check the mixer option.

Once the mixer is open, you can move to it by pressing Ctrl+Windows+Tab. Remember that this is the keystroke for moving to each of the open tool windows in turn. It is very important that you do not try to use mixer keystrokes when you have not moved to the mixer because most of these keystrokes do different things in the score.

You can easily tell if you are in the mixer by pressing JAWS Key+T.

Sizing the mixer

The mixer can be resized by dragging the bottom edge up and down with the mouse. If it is too small to show all of the controls, a scroll bar will be shown down the right hand side of the mixer. This scroll bar can be used to show the parts of the mixer which are out of view.

When you navigate the mixer, you will sometimes be told that the mixer needs to be “scrolled down” or “scrolled up”. Doing this is easy. You need only press page up or page down and Sibelius Access will do the rest.

It is important that the mixer is as large as it can be, because this cuts down on the number of times that you will need to scroll. In fact, you will only need to scroll the mixer if you have a large number of instruments. You’ll normally find that all the controls can be fitted into one view, provided that the mixer has been fully sized.

When you first move to the mixer, Sibelius Access will determine if the mixer is large enough. If it needs to be resized, you will be told this, and asked to press Alt+R (R for Resize). In some unusual cases, the mixer becomes so large that its bottom edge is below the top of the task bar. If this happens, you will be asked to press Alt+R to resize it.

Mixer Strips

“Strip” is the word used to describe a group of controls in the mixer. There are five types of strips which can be found in the mixer, although some of these strips will only be found in scores which use virtual instruments.

Staff strips
There is one strip for each staff in the score that you can use to control the settings for that staff. The most common settings are volume, mute and solo.

Click strip
The click strip controls the metronome. It is considered to be a staff strip and will always come immediately after the last staff in the score. If you choose to hide the staff strips, the click strip will be hidden as well.

Group strips
Instruments are divided into families, e.g. brass, strings and keyboards. There is one group strip for each family of instruments which is represented in the score and it controls all of the instruments which belong to that family.

Virtual instruments
Virtual instruments are software synthesisers like the GPO, VSL and Synful. Each virtual instrument has its own strip. Unfortunately, these are not supported at this time.

Effects bus strips
The output from each virtual instrument is fed to one of four buses. Two virtual effects can then be added to the bus so that the instruments routed to it will be altered by those effects. There is one strip for each bus. Unfortunately these are not supported at this time.

The strips are arranged one below the other, each one forming a row. Some strips also contain a green triangle at the far left. Clicking on this triangle will either expand the strip into several rows of buttons, or collapse the strip into a single row which contains the most important controls. Unfortunately, the expanding and collapsing of strips is not supported at this time.

Hiding and showing strips

There are five buttons across the top of the mixer which hide or show the different types of strips. Hiding unnecessary strips is a good way to ensure that you don’t need to keep scrolling the mixer in large scores.

Moving between strips

When you enter the mixer you will be placed on the first strip. This will usually be the strip of the highest staff in the score.

Each strip is described in brief as you move to it. If you try to move to a strip which is not visible, you will be asked to scroll the mixer. Press page up if you are asked to scroll the mixer up and press page down if you are asked to scroll the mixer down.

You can use JAWS' say line feature to have the current strip described. If you don't want to keep turning the number lock on and off, you can use the laptop keystroke (JAWS+I) and use the insert key in the "mid section".

Mute

Muting a staff stops it from playing back with the other staves. One of the best uses for this is silenceing a part so that you can play along with the score without hearing the part from Sibelius as well.

A staff can be fully-muted, half-muted or un-muted. To Cycle through these settings, move to the staff strip in the mixer and press the letter M.

The following example shows how to silence the drums in the "Bebop" score that comes with Sibelius.

One thing you need to be careful about is that whenever you switch to another application and then go back to Sibelius, you will be placed back in the score window. So, you'll need to press Ctrl+Windows+Tab to go back to the mixer. The good news is that Sibelius Access will remember which strip you were on, so you wont have to work down through all the staves again.

You can mute any number of strips, however you should know that if you solo a strip, all the mute buttons will be disabled until you unsolo the strip again.

Solo

Solo is the exact opposite of mute. In stead of silencing the strip, it silences every other strip. This is the ideal way to listen to a part on its own. You can also solo combinations of instruments. For instance, you could solo the trumpet and upright bass so that you can listen to them together without the other parts.

Pressing the letter S will solo or unsolo the staff. This button is a straight forward toggle. If the staff is not soloed, pressing S will solo it, and if it is soloed, pressing S will unsolo it.

Volume

Each strip has a volume slider on it. Unfortunately, this slider is not an easy control for JAWS to operate so there will be a delay after you press one of the keystrokes that manipulates it.

Pressing the right arrow will increase the volume in small steps whereas pressing control + right arrow will increase it in larger steps. Conversely, left arrow decreases the volume in small steps and control + left arrow decreases it in larger steps. These keystrokes are the same for the sliders in all types of strips.

As with muting and soloing, you only need to move to the strip and then use the arrow keys to change the volume.

Group strips

The group strips allow you to control all of the instruments which belong to the same group. In this case, the word group really means family, such as strings, woodwind, percussion, etc. For instance, pressing M in the brass group strip, will silence every brass instrument at once, useful!

The controls on the group strips are the same as those on the staff strips, except that a group strip cannot be expanded to reveal other controls. (Note that Sibelius Access does not support the expanding of strips in any case.)

A common use of the group strip is to balance one family of instruments with another. For example, you may need to balance all of the strings against all of the brass, because one group is dominating the other. In stead of adjusting each instrument individually, you can simply use the volume sliders in the group strips.

The click strip

The click strip is located below the staff strips and above all other types of strips. This is the strip to use if you need to change the volume of the metronome.

Remember that you can mute and unmute the metronome by pressing Alt+F7 from the main score. This keystroke manipulates the mute button in the playback window, which is a duplicate of the one in the mixer.

General comments

The mixer is a very graphical interface and the only way for JAWS to control it is by remote controlling the mouse and examining the colours of specific pixels within the mixer window.

For example, when you press M, the mouse pointer is first moved to the mute button and a left click performed. The mouse pointer is then moved away from the button so that the colours of the pixels in the button can be examined. These colours are used to determine the state of the button.

Although every effort has been made to ensure robust behaviour in the mixer, JAWS is doing a great deal of work here, and so unexpected things may happen. If you encounter any problems, it is important that you let the developers know so that the problem can be investigated.