The Maestro Conducting
Geek-o-meter: 1️⃣ 2 3
36 dollars.
6 to 8 cups of coffee in New York, the average American single-person household spending on food for 2-3 days, and according to this list, a lot of good stuff, and most importantly, not even two months of a Sibelius Ultimate subscription.
It’s also the cost of Keyboard Maestro.
What does this cryptic programming app to 'Automate applications or websites, text or images, simple or complex, on command or scheduled' have to do with writing music? I hear you ask. Well, nothing! Instead, this app is made to make nothing stand in the way of you making music. How? By performing certain actions on certain triggers.
As we can see in this example from their website, whenever ⌥⇧⌘C is pressed (the trigger), KM copies the selection, switches to the previous application, pastes, switches back to the application you started in (action). This whole thing is called a macro, and macros can reside in different groups that can be made available in different apps or on different computers.
Let’s see what this can look like to us Sibbers.[^1]
Text Expansion
As I mentioned in the post about word menus, we could press a shortcut (the trigger) to write an expression (the action). This is also a function called text expansion. Text expansion can be seen as using a string of characters as a keyboard shortcut. They don’t require any modifier keys but can be triggered with a three-letter word to expand to a full paragraph. Usually, when we write, a space follows certain characters like the period, comma, colon, and semicolon. That’s why they are handy to use as triggers for text expansion. So, instead using ⌘E in the word menu to trigger ‘espress.’ we can use ‘.esp’ instead.
In Keyboard Maestro, I can make a group called Sibelius Word Menus, and as you can see, I can have it be available only in Sibelius.
Unlike the word menus, this doesn’t differentiate between technique text and expression, but in other ways, it is much more powerful.
This group I mainly use for 3 things:
Making sure longer words and phrases are executed correctly with a minimum of keystrokes.
Here I made a macro triggered whenever I type .pap. Because it is in this group, it only triggers in Sibelius. It triggers whether I’m in a text box or not, so I have to make sure to be editing a text box. That’s why I’ve chosen a combination that is unique to this. The trigger is then the text inserted as ‘poco a poco’. I already have a word menu shortcut for cresc. so adding poco a poco is very simple.
2. Correctly formatting text. I have similar expansions that start with the colon that then adds the text without parenthesis.
3: Using correct glyphs so I get the correct ½-glyph instead of 1/2 which looks much nicer to me.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Keyboard Maestro in itself is a much more powerful automation tool than Sibelius. When KM doesn’t differentiate between technique and expression text for trigger environments, it seems like a weakness. On the other hand, word menus are only triggered by shortcuts, be it a single key (E) or a modifier + a single key (⌥E). KM has the functionality of the typed string trigger where simply the sequence ‘. p a p’ will trigger the command. This means that .pap can mean ‘poco a poco’ and .pop can mean ‘put on pants’.[^2]
KM can also handle multiple triggers. Say, you never know how to spell bisbigliando. My primary trigger is .bis, but I can also set it to be bibsbigliando, bisbilgiando, or any other misspelling I have noticed I tend to write. Then, KM will simply replace my failed attempt with the winning ticket, and no harpist need frown.
Practice
I urge you to get a copy of Keyboard Maestro and start small. For instance, set up your own typed string triggers for a couple of email salutations. For example, have .kr trigger:
Kind regards,
Hubert Humpeldinck[^3]
and .atb:
All the best,
Roger Flintstone
with the line break and comma in place already.
You’ll quickly see how KM saves you time and shaves precious seconds off your work for mundane or repetitive tasks. Find a couple of text strings you repeatedly type in Sibelius and have a go at them for a couple of weeks.
Keyboard Maestro’s About menu has this handy feature of calculating how much time it saves you, so enjoy checking in on that for a couple of weeks and enjoy the compounding spare time add up.
For the price of 8 cups of hipster coffee, it can quickly return you that investment in time.
Footloose
[^1]: The colloquial term for Sibelius users.
[^2]: If you would ever find yourself in a situation where you need this.
[^3]: Or whatever name you prefer.