I have a chord that consists of a half note and a quarter note which goes to another quarter note. Is there any way to notate this without the half note being written as two quarter notes tied? Or do I have to use different voices (which I would like to avoid).
Im also on Dorico Elements fyi
This is exactly what different voices are for. Notes of different lengths can’t share a stem. (It may look like they do if the stems overlap, but they have to be separate voices.)
Fortunately it’s easy to change the voice of the tied note. When you do, it becomes a half note automatically.
Why do you want to avoid using a different voice?
You can do it with different voices, then change the voice column index to make the voices appear like they are on the same stem.
I’m still not sure why you would want to do this though. What is the specific situation that would call for this? This would generally be considered incorrect and poor notation unless you have a specific circumstance I’m not envisioning.
EDIT: Just saw you said you were on Elements. Perhaps that feature isn’t available then. In that case I would just use voices and do it the “correct” way.
This seems to be the most elegant solution.
