From the course: Sibelius Ultimate 2019 Essential Training: The Basics

Getting familiar with the keypad - Sibelius Tutorial

From the course: Sibelius Ultimate 2019 Essential Training: The Basics

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Getting familiar with the keypad

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- To begin this lesson, let's create a new, fresh score. If you have a score already opened, go ahead and close it to get to the quick start window. You can also use command+n or control+n to start a new score. From the new score tab of the quick start, under "no category", I want you to choose either the treble staff or base staff manuscript paper, whichever cleft you are most comfortable with. I'm going to choose treble staff and when you've made your decision, go ahead and double click on the manuscript paper icon to skip the new score set-up process and open the score. Once the score is open, if you need to you can maximize the window and close any undesirable floating panels that may appear. You'll actually want to keep the keypad panel visible so you can leave it in place if it's there. If you do not see the keypad panel, you can use the shortcut command+option+k on Mac, or control+alt+k on Windows to make it visible or visit the view tab, the panels group, and check keypad. Let's also test your time signature skills by adding a 4/4 time signature to the beginning of this score. I'm going to center this score on my page here and zoom in just a tiny bit for you. So I'm going to escape so that nothing is selected in the score, t for time signature, we'll grab a 4/4 and click it right to the right of that first cleft and now we have a 4/4 time signature and you can go ahead and escape. If you'd like to hide the playback line, you can do that as well. Go to the view tab, invisible group, and uncheck playback line. And let's go ahead and save this score so we can come back to it later, you can use command or control+s. This is the first time you're saving so you're going to need to give it a name. I'm going to call mine 07_02 and place it where you'd like it to go and click save. So now you have a nice, clean, simple blank canvas for practicing note input, but before you start inputting notes, you need to become much more familiar with the keypad panel. Go ahead and position the keypad panel somewhere in the middle of the screen for now. The on-screen keypad panel is where you're going to select all of your notes durations, accidentals, articulations, and ties so that you can input them onto score page. There are a few things you need to know about this panel in order to be successful getting started with it. First notice that the keypad, has six separate layouts that are accessible from a button row at the top of the panel. For now, I want you to make sure that you remain in keypad layout #1 which is called common notes. If you notice that your keypad layout changes, make sure you go back and click on the button here for layout #1 to return to your common notes layout. Next, at the bottom of the keypad panel is another button row numbered one through four plus all. These are your voice selectors. Sivalia allows up to four voices per staff; if you click on the voice selector, you'll see that they're color coded. Number one is blue, voice two is green, voice three is orange, and voice four is purple. I want you to make sure that you remain in voice one, the blue colored voice, for now. If you start inputting notes, and they appear in any of the other colors, green, orange, or purple, then you should immediately stop, undo, and get yourself back into voice one by clicking on that voice one button at the bottom of the keypad. A few smaller notes about the keypad, and specially keypad layout #1, the large button on the bottom right, this one here with the curved line, provides you with a tie, not a slur. It's a very common mistake for beginners to think that they can input a slur using that button on the keypad but you can't; it's definitely a tie. Also in keypad layout #1, there are two dots, the dot at the top of the keypad next to the other note head marking is a staccato marking. The dot at the bottom of the keypad is a rhythm dot that you can add to any selected note value to increase its value by one-half. So be sure to keep all of these things in mind as you get started using the keypad for note input.

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