Kevin Kern

Sibelius and Sibelius Speaking make the previously impossible happen.

After completing my "Best of" CD, I received a call telling me that the Japanese distributor wanted to release a sheet music folio as a companion to the '"Best of" CD in his territory. To do this, he would need six tunes that didn't exist in print anywhere else. Since I felt there was no time to farm the work out to a sighted transcriber, I decided to undertake the challenge myself. I had just acquired Sibelius and decided to use this project as an opportunity to learn both it and David Pinto's Sibelius Speaking scripts. In the course of some ten days, I prepared six tunes covering around forty pages of music from scratch. I was both copyist and arranger for this. While preparing this stuff, I discovered how to notate things like two voices on one staff, triplets, time signatures, key signatures, rehearsal letters, pedalings, metronome markings, titles, composer and copyright notations among many other things. I also found myself constantly needing to copy and paste multi-measure segments between discontiguous sections of scores, correcting notation errors by moving around the score at will, and making innumerable editorial decisions concerning how to reduce a score meant for piano and orchestra to one piano 2 hands.

You, the reader, are certain to appreciate that you wouldn't want to trust these critical tasks to others if you have a choice. With Sibelius and Sibelius Speaking Scripts, you have that choice. This product represents the opportunity to participate in arenas previously inaccessible to the blind musician/composer no matter what his or her talent.