User manual

535
Polyphonic voicing
Strategies: How many voices do I
need?
Well, it depends…
• If you are scoring for vocals, you simply need one voice for
each voice, so to speak.
• Often you will use voices for resolving the problem of overlap-
ping notes (see “Overlapping notes” on page 532), for exam-
ple when scoring for piano. In this case, you will need two
voices each time two notes overlap. If three notes overlap, you
will need three voices. In other words you will need to check
for the “worst case” (largest number of overlapping notes at a
certain position) and activate that many. If you don’t know how
many notes you need when starting out to prepare a score,
don’t worry, you can add more voices later.
• Voices 1 and 2 on the upper staff and 5 and 6 on the lower
are special. These handle “collisions” (notes with small inter-
vals, accidentals that otherwise would come too close, etc.)
automatically which the other voices don’t. Always use these
voices first!
• An example: in the situation below, three voices are required.
The lowest note overlaps both the “melody” and the chords,
so it can’t share a voice with the chords. The chords overlap
the melody, so they can’t share a voice either.
Entering notes into voices
When you add new notes, you need to decide which
voice they go into:
1. Make sure the extended toolbar is visible.
2. Select the Object Selection tool.
3. If you have a split system, check the voice Insert
buttons.
These are displayed after the text “Insert” on the left side on the extended
toolbar. Only the voices that are activated on the Polyphonic tab are
shown. If the upper staff is active, the voice Insert buttons are numbered
1, 2, etc., otherwise they are numbered 5, 6, etc.
Here three voices are available on the upper staff.
4. If you need to switch the voice icons to the right “clef”,
click somewhere in the system you want to insert notes in.
5. Select one of the voices by clicking on the corre-
sponding button.
Any notes you enter from now on will be inserted into that voice.
Voice 3 activated for insertion.
6. Insert the notes as usual, see “Adding and editing no-
tes” on page 515.
7. If you want to switch to another voice, click the corre-
sponding button.
8. If you want to insert notes into a voice on the other
clef, click on that clef and then select a voice using the
buttons.
Symbols and voices
Later in this manual you will learn about symbols that can
be added to the score. Many of these symbols must also
be put into a particular voice. See “Important! – Symbols,
staves and voices” on page 562.
Checking which voice a note
belongs to
When you select one (and only one) note, the correspond-
ing voice button on the extended toolbar is selected. This
allows you to quickly find out which voice a certain note is
in (after you have used the Move To Voice function, for ex-
ample).
• When you step through the notes using the arrow keys,
you will only step through the notes in one voice at a time.
This can be used as a quick way to check which notes belong to the
same voice as some other note.