How can you change the stem direction for a stretch of notes, and not for the whole voice? And by stretch I may mean anything from a few bars to dozens of pages plus, so fiddly to do in engrave mode I think?
Select them and press F to flip the stem.
But I want to continue in the current stem direction. Flipping the selected stems, the next entered note goes in at the original direction. I want to retain the selected direction until otherwise instructed. And I prefer to see the notes entered in the direction I want,. not a post entry adjustment.
I may be spoiled coming frim Lilypond, where I can just say stemUp for a while and then stemDown and so on. [I am trying hard not to bring Lilypond into things all the time, sorry!]
Hi Andro, I guess it’s natural if you’re used to another software to compare the two! I’m sure early on in my use of Dorico I was doing the same.
Here’s some information about how Dorico handles voices, and also stem direction in different contexts - basically if there’s nothing in any other voice in a whole bar, a voice gets treated as a single voice, regardless of its stem direction. There are notation options for when to show rests in other voices, and you can always flip stems as Dan said. If you need to specify a whole bar rest where one won’t appear automatically, you can do that too.
I am going to try really hard not to keep referencing Lilypond!
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You can select an existing passage, right-click (or click the Edit menu) > Stem > Force Stem Up or Force Stem Down. You can’t do this pre-emptively; the music has to exist first.