Change or disable playback of glissandi in Sibelius

Sibelius’s magnetic glissandi, long overdue and finally introduced in 2017 in the Sibelius 8.6 release, automatically snap to notes and are much easier to create and position than the old-fashioned glissandi lines.

You can easily toggle the style of a magnetic glissando line by changing its Slide style in the Inspector > Lines. The default options will appear here, as well as any other glissandi lines you’ve created by duplicating an existing style.

What’s more, you can change the playback style of a glissando or disable its playback entirely without affecting its notation.

Change the playback of a glissando

You may not realize that the playback properties of glissando lines are controlled in the Inspector, too, in the Playback section. They’re found in Gliss / Rit / Accel:

The Instrument default will be the setting found in Home > Instruments > Edit Instruments > Edit Instrument… Playback Defaults > Glissando type.

For example, a trombone’s default glissando type is Continuous:

A flute, on the other hand, has its default Glissando type set to Chromatic. For a piano, it is White notes.

Whatever the default may be, you can always override it on a case-by-case basis by selecting an individual glissando and changing its Gliss / Rit / Accel property in the Inspector.

Disable the playback of a glissando

If you wish to disable playback of a magnetic glissando completely, this is done in the Inspector > Playback as well. Simply set the Gliss / Rit / Accel to None.

An important tip: do not turn off Play on pass for the line (the pre-Sibelius 8.6 method of disabling glissando playback) or the parent note will be silenced as well.