I’ve got 3 trombones playing chords. They are divided onto separate staves. I’ve got condensing on. When I go into engrave mode to view the condensed score, the first few bars all have the same stem direction but then one of the trombones has the stem down and the other 2 have the stem up until the end of the score. Why? I’ve checked that all staves are only using upstem voice 1 so why the sudden change in one of the stem directions? See attachment for a screen grab.
This is undiagnosable from this screenshot. Dorico condenses in phrases; typically a phrase starts and finishes at a rest. Dorico can only use one condensing approach per phrase. Please show us the uncondensed music up to and including the next rest.
I put a few rests here and there and that appeared to force the stems into the same direction, but not yet for the whole section - it seems arbitrary. But this makes the condensing divisi feature totally useless. Does this imply that I have to compose in a certain rhythmic way to force the stems? Unless I’m doing something totally wrong.
No. You can insert an empty Condensing Change (e.g. insert a Condensing Change but don’t flick any switches), and that will tell Dorico to artificially start a new phrase at that point.
If you can share the whole chunk of music that’s problematic, we can give more targeted advice - it may be that there are specific discrepancies relating to slurs/articulation marks/dynamics etc. that are tripping you up.
Thanks pianoleo. I didn’t know about condensing changes. I managed to solve my problem. I eventually found that I had to put a single condensing change half way through the phrase but I had to force the condensing approach to be manual at this point. I discovered this by placing a bunch of empty condensing changes from the end of the score until such time that they failed. This allowed me to pinpoint the troublesome spot, make the forced manual change and then delete all the subsequent empty changes, ending up with only the single change.