Entering and editing text (using technique text)

Let's begin entering and editing text by choosing one of the most simple text styles to work with, technique text. Technique text is a simple staff text that you would use to indicate performance directions for individual instruments or staves in your score. This text style defaults to a position above the staff and it uses a very basic font, like something you might see in a word processor. For this example, I've rearranged our previous Row Your Boat exercise for three stringed instruments. And I thought it might be fun to indicate for them using technique text to play the final bars of the arrangement with the pizzicato technique.

So we're going to enter a pizzicato indication in both violin parts,here in bar 39, and also at the very end for the last note in the cello part. Now since this is our first time entering text, I will run you through a lot of the different ways you can input text on the score page. Let's go ahead and zoom in first. I'm going to start here on the violin, selecting its note and using Command+Plus or Ctrl+ Plus. Now one way we can insert any object into the score, including text, is by loading it into the mouse. First, we have to make sure we escape out of the score so that nothing is selected, so I'm going to use Escape two or three times just to make sure.

In order to load the mouse with the text style, we can go up to the Create menu, down to Text, and we can choose the type of text from here. And remember we can also go to the Create menu. I'm going to escape. If we have a right-clicking mouse, or we can Ctrl+Click and of we were on the white area of the page, we get that same Create menu. We can go down to Text and choose the style from there. You can also load the mouse using the text style's quick key. So I'm going to go ahead and select Technique Text here and you'll notice that my mouse will turn blue and I can go in and click that technique text anywhere on the score page.

I want to make sure I attach it to this note, so I'm going to click it here and Sibelius gives us a flashing cursor. Once you get the flashing cursor, all you have to do is simply type what you'd like to have appear on the page, in this case, pizz., and then just make sure that you Escape twice. Escaping once keeps that text selected; escaping twice gets you completely out of the score. So now let's run through another option you have for inserting text on the page, and that is by first selecting an object before entering the text so that we make sure the text style is attached to that object.

So down in the violin part I'm going to select a note first, rather than loading the text style in my mouse. With a note selected or an object selected, Sibelius will create that object next to it. So I could use the quick key for Technique Text or again I could go to the menu. In this case let's go ahead and use the quick key, Command+T or Ctrl+T, and Sibelius gives us that flashing cursor one more time and we can type in pizz. and Escape twice, one, two.

There's one more way we can input text on the page. I'm going to go down into the cello part here on this last note. Now I like selecting the object before entering the text, so that's how I'm going to probably do this from now on. I will zoom in on it a little bit here. And I like using the quick key, so I'm going to use Command+T or Ctrl+T on PC to get that technique text indicator here. Now once you have the flashing cursor, you can choose to either type the word that you'd like to have appear or each text style has an independent word menu associated with it.

And you can access that word menu once you get this flashing cursor here by right-clicking or Ctrl+Clicking if you don't have a right-clicking mouse. Make sure you have the flashing cursor first and then right-click or Ctrl+Click and you'll get a word menu. On the Mac, it's going to look like this and you can just lay your mouse over the arrow to see the rest of the menu. On a PC, it'll look a little bit different. It's going to be a big box of words that you'll be able to see. In this case, here's our pizzicato indicator. So all I have to do is just select it and Sibelius puts it on the screen for me.

And one more time we're going to Escape twice, one, two. So creating text is very easy, but what if you make a mistake? Let's say I had gone in here and typed the wrong letter or something like that. You can always go back and edit text once it's on the screen by just double-clicking on it. So double-click, one, two. It launches you back into this word processor like mode where you can go through with your mouse or with your arrow keys and you can edit the contents of that text. If I wanted that, I could just Escape and have that.

In this case I want to put it back to pizz., and Escape twice again. If you wanted to just delete text, you can always select the text object and then use the Delete key or the Backspace key on PC to delete it entirely from the score. Now I don't want to do that so I'm going to use Command+Z or Ctrl+Z to Undo and Escape. So, creating and editing technique text is very simple. It's a text style that you can use for a variety of instrumental or vocal directions on individual parts within your score. Technique text will also playback many of your type directions.

So if you've given a string instrument a pizzicato indication, as I have in this example, you may want to play back the score from a few bars before where you enter the text to hear the text take effect. I'm just going to click here on this note and I'm going to use the letter P to play. (Music playing)