User manual

532
Polyphonic voicing
About this chapter
In this chapter you will learn:
• How to decide when to use polyphonic voicing.
• How to set up voices.
• How to automatically convert your score to polyphonic voicing.
• How to enter and move notes into voices.
Background: Polyphonic voicing
Polyphonic voicing allows you to resolve a number of situ-
ations impossible to score properly otherwise:
• Notes starting at the same position, but with different lengths.
Without polyphonic voicing you get unnecessary amounts of
ties.
Without and with polyphonic voicing.
• Vocal scoring and similar. Without polyphonic voicing, all notes
starting at the same position are considered parts of a chord.
With polyphonic voicing you can give each voice a stem direc-
tion, you can have individual rest handling for each voice etc.
Without and with polyphonic voicing.
• Complicated piano systems. Without polyphonic voicing you
have to resort to a fixed split note setting to decide which
notes go on which clef. With polyphonic voicing the splitpoint
can be “floating”. The program can even automatically put a
bass line on the lower clef for you!
With a split system and with polyphonic voicing.
How voices are created
There are eight voices. The first thing you do is to set them
up. This includes “telling” the program which voices be-
long to the upper clef and which belong to the lower, how
you want rests displayed for each voice, etc.
The second thing you do is to move or enter notes into the
voices. If you have a recording done already, the program
can do much of this work for you, automatically. You might
then want to fine tune by moving one or more notes into
another voice, or you might want to add notes to a certain
voice. See “Adding and editing notes” on page 515.
Overlapping notes
Throughout this chapter you will encounter the term “over-
lapping notes”. Two notes are considered overlapping
when they are on the same staff and:
• They start at the same position, but have different note values
(for example whole note and a quarter note both at the begin-
ning of a bar), or…
Notes starting at the same position, without and with polyphonic voices.
• One note starts before another has ended. For example a half
note at the beginning of a bar and an eighth note at the sec-
ond beat.
A note that starts before another has ended, without and with poly-
phonic voices.
Voices and MIDI channels
Internally the program organizes the notes into voices by
changing their MIDI channel values. Normally you set it up
so that notes with MIDI channel 3 belong to voice 3 etc.
Most of the time the link between MIDI channels and
voices will be totally transparent to you as a user. Some-
times you can take advantage of this relationship, as de-
scribed later in this chapter. There are also a few other
important things to note:
!
Each voice is polyphonic. In other words, one voice
can contain chords.