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

Overview of text styles - Sibelius Tutorial

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

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Overview of text styles

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- [Instructor] Text styles in Sibelius have a variety of properties associated with them such as font type, font size, font style, their position relative to the staff or page and their associated Word Menu. Sibelius's text styles are also categorized into system text, staff text and blank page text. System text, like system lines, may appear only once or twice in the score, but they'll appear in every part. Staff text will only appear within the part it's attached to in the score and blank page text will only attach to areas within blank pages, like title pages. The best way to see the categorization of text styles in Sibelius is by visiting the Legacy Create menu which can still be accessed in Sibelius by right clicking with your mouse on an empty area of the score page. When the small Create menu appears, hover your mouse over Text to reveal the Legacy Text menu. Light gray horizontal lines clearly separate the listed text styles in the Text menu into different categories. All of the text styles that are listed in the top section of this menu above this first line here, Other Staff Text and above, those are all staff text text styles. All of the text styles that are listed in the middle section of the menu, from Title down to Other System Text are all system text styles. This menu also includes a bank of blank page text styles, and the final section of the menu labeled Special Text, contains advanced or less common system and staff text styles. The most common text styles have short cuts already associated with them, which you can see here in their Text menu. Text shortcuts have modifier themes associated with them as well, so your staff text here you'll see the modifier is usually Control on Windows or Command on Mac, plus the first letter of the text style. And system text styles, like the Tempo text, tend to have the modifiers Command + Option on Mac or Ctrl + Alt on Windows, again, plus the first letter of the text style. Text styles are also listed in a gallery within the ribbons so we can press Escape and go up to the Text tab to the Styles group here. If you don't see a preview in your Styles group you may see a Styles button and if you click on the Styles button, it will reveal the Text Styles Gallery. If your screen looks a little bit more like mine you can click this little eject looking button and reveal the Gallery from there. Once you expand the Text Styles Gallery you'll see that it has a lot of information in it which can make it a bit difficult to navigate and decipher. It also does not clearly separate staff text styles from system text styles for you. For those reasons, many Sibelians prefer to use the Right Click + Create text menu instead of the Text Styles Gallery. The choice is, of course, up to you. Sibelius provides at least two ways to input all objects, including text styles. Either you can Escape out and load the object into your mouse like this and then click it onto the score page, like that. And if it's a text style, we'd have to fill it in, we'll get to that in a bit. Or you can select an object in the score and create the new object next to your selection. Now once you've engaged a text style you just saw you'll have the choice of typing in the text that you want, or right clicking and choosing a word, symbol or phrase from a Word Menu, let's go ahead and try this real quick. Escape so nothing is selected in the score, select a note and go to your Text Styles Gallery and find the Expression button that looks like this and engage that and you'll get a flashing cursor. So that's engaging the text style and then you can either type and you can try that right now. Or with that flashing cursor still there you can right click and get the Word Menu. So the contents of the Word Menus are defined in Sibelius's preferences it might be beneficial to visit the Word Menus page of preferences to look around a bit before you begin inputting text. You'll be connecting many dots between text styles and Word Menu preferences as you begin inputting text into Sibelius. Let me show you a little bit of that. I'm going to Escape, Command + Comma for preferences, Word Menus. So the expression text style is used for entering dynamics and expressions below the staff, so you can see the things that are included in the Word Menu are all of your dynamics and expressions like dolce and molto poco, you can add to it, tenuto, things like that. Whereas if we go into our Technique text, if you were to engage its' Word Menu, you'll have things in regular font above the staff, things like divisi, mute and things of that nature. So this area of preferences connects us to our Word Menus that we're going to be seeing when we're inputting text into the score. I'm going to go ahead and Escape out. So as you work a bit more with the different text styles in Sibelius, you'll probably find very specific ways that you prefer to input each of them. Some input methods work better than others, depending on the text style you're working with. Now that we know a little bit about all of the text styles in the rest of this chapter, we'll focus in on few of the most common text styles and how best to use them.

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