Conflicting needs: MIDI Ch# in Score vs. VSTi's

Say I have a harmony part in the Score with 2 voices in each the treble & bass staves. To have each pair share a stem instead of each having their own I’ll set the two upper notes to channel 1 and the two lower notes to channel 3.

This works great if they are all playing the same VSTi patch since I can set the channel in the track’s inspector so they all actually play on a single channel. However sometimes I want each of the four voices to play different instrument patches. To do that I need to set the channel to “Any” in the track’s inspector and assign the voices in the midi part to channels 1-4. Of course that makes the score look ugly with stems all over the place.

The way I’ve been resolving this is to just copy the midi parts to a new track and set up one version for playback and the other for the score. This works, but increases the risk of mistakes if I later edit the part since I need to make sure all the changes in both copies are the same.

I’m wondering if there is a better way to manage the sometime conflicting usage of channel numbers for scoring and playback that I’ve overlooked.

It sounds like you could turn off polyphony just use a split staff. (since you say want two voices to share a stem)

Only inconvenience, the track would have a fixed split point. (one thing that Logic Pro does do nicely :wink: )

You mean Logic automagically moves the split point?

In Logic, you simply draw a curve… everything above the curve goes to the upper staff, everything below it goes to the lower… lovely :wink:.

Wow, elegant.

Something I don’t get :
Why would stems change when you change the channel of the notes ?

Be sure not to use polyphony or split, and proceed as you said, set channel to “Any” and simply change the channel of the notes that you want to assign to another instrument.

When the staff is set to “Polyphonic”, there can be up to four independent “lines (voices)” per upper/lower staff (each voice being determined by its MIDI channel), and you can set stem direction, rests, etc. per voice. In reality, if you have separate “voices” with the same stem direction, they (deliberately) don’t line up with stems from other voices (to avoid confusion with other voices that may have more than one note in that voice at that time)… in other words, it looks “messy” :wink:.

Totally agree with you Vic. That’s why I said : don’t use Polyphonic or Split.

If I understand well, he wants each note of a pair of notes in each staff, share the same stem but play different instruments. So why use Polyphonic mode in this case ? Put all the notes in each staff to the same voice and just change the channel of notes when needed.
Right ?

He can still use split, since channels are not used for voice display purposes…

Wow, this thread got a lot responses overnight.

Vic is on target that I’m using Polyphonic and not split because the split point isn’t constant. Interesting about how Logic does it. That would be a nice feature for Cubase.

I don’t really understand this suggestion. The only way I know to have the Score Editor display a grand staff instead of just a single bass or treble staff is to set it to Split or Polyphonic.