Reset accidentals in Sibelius

Sibelius has decent options for setting rules for cautionary accidentals to appear automatically. But they don’t cover every edge case and exception, so sooner or later, you’ll need to manually add, remove, or bracket an accidental to make your music clearer to understand.

Here are the settings in today’s project example, which can be found in Appearance > Engraving Rules > Accidentals and Dots. They may look different from yours, but that’s another discussion for another day.

Today we’re concerned with resetting accidentals to the default state specified in these rules, if you’ve manually changed an accidental to diverge from what would ordinarily appear.

Here’s an example passage as entered, with Sibelius automatically applying accidentals as specified in my Engraving Rules:

And here’s the one that I manually modified in three locations:

1.) and 2.): I added parenthesized (bracketed) naturals to confirm that these notes should not be sharp, because of the similarity to the previous bar.

3.) I removed the natural that Sibelius added here; the natural on a C earlier in the bar was already added, and there is no need for another one, especially since there was no note in that register previously.

Again, we can table the discussion about whether you agree with these decisions or not! The point here is to quickly and reliably reset the second passage to the settings in the Engraving Rules.

This is an easy process but not totally obvious.

First, make a selection for the passage on which you wish to reset the accidentals. If you want to apply this to your entire score, select the entire score (Home > Select > Select All).

Head over to the sixth Keypad layout — Accidentals — and select the Bracket accidental key.

Yes, this will bracket all of the accidentals. Don’t worry. Select the key again, and the brackets will disappear, except for the ones that should be there (if any) according to your Engraving Rules.

In our example, you’ll see that the brackets on the 1.) and 2.) locations have been removed. However, the cautionary accidental in location 3.) is still suppressed.

Next, in the same Keypad layout, select the Suppress auto cautionary accidentals key.

All of the automatic cautionary accidentals are suppressed, but again, don’t worry. Select the key again, and now all of the automatic cautionary accidentals, including the one in location 3.) has been restored.

So, in summary, to reset accidentals in Sibelius:

• Select the material to be reset
• Double-tap the Bracket accidental key
• Double-tap the Suppress auto cautionary accidentals key

Whether you discovered this post accidentally or not, let us know what you think, in the comments.