Apologies if this has been brought up before - a quick search didn’t reveal anything.
When entering note input mode at a point immediately following a passage with multiple voices, Dorico automatically starts input on the down-stem voice. It’s often not until later that I realise I’ve been inputting music into the wrong voice the whole time, and on the rare occasion I want to input music into the down-stem voice first, I usually check anyway.
Is there a particular reason that this behaviour is default? I would personally find it more intuitive to automatically input on the upper-most voice.
Dorico makes this decision based on some combination of whatever notes/voices came before, or whatever voice you worked with last, or whatever note/voice you have selected when you invoke note input. Otherwise, it defaults to Voice 1 when there’s nothing to inform its decision.
If you find this behavior problematic, you’ll need to get used to checking the little quarter note icon to tell you what voice you’re in. You can also use View Voice Colors while you’re getting used to Dorico’s behavior.
I’ve adjusted to this by learning to check the icon. Usually I get the voice I expect, occasionally I have to change it.
It gets it right almost all the time, but it’s one case in particular: following a barline.
What seems to be happening is the down-stem bar rest is “in front” of the up-stem bar rest.
This happens regardless of which voice I enter first or selected last.
Hmm, you’re right. I just tried that and got the same result! It’s as if the following bar rest gets appropriated to the downstem voice as the preferred one.
When more downstem voices are added, the bar rest is appropriated to the bottom-most voice, as well as all subsequent bar rests.
I agree with you, that doesn’t seem like the desired default behavior.
Dorico doesn’t consider any particular voice to have primacy once there is more than one of them on the staff: they’re all treated equally. When there are two or more voices active and both are showing an implicit bar rest, it’s probably actually strictly speaking indeterminate which rest will be drawn “on top”. It’s unlikely this is going to change in the near future, but fortunately as Dan says there is a completely reliable way to determine what voice you’re in shown on the caret before you input even one note, and changing to another voice is a single key press.
Hi!
While I, too mostly check if I’m typing into the correct voice, occasionally I forget, and while swapping voices is a very quick operation in Dorico, sometimes I’ll have input quite a lot before realising my mistake. Even though it’s a minor inconvenience, I’d like to be able to instruct Dorico that “if I’ve input music in some other player’s staff, when I return to a staff in which multiple voices exist prior to the bar I enter input mode, Dorico defaults to up stem voice 1”, or something to that effect, as that’s virtually always what I want to do.
Now, it seems to always default to the down stem voice which makes little sense to me.
I just wanted to add my voice (pun?) to this thread, and seeing as it’s three and a half years old, ask if this might be implemented some time in the future?
Best regards!
Jim
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My guess is that the logic is, “you’ve added a second voice and that was the thing you were most recently using, so we are going to presume that’s what you want to keep using.”
At least for me, it doesn’t default to the down stem voice, but rather whatever was most recently used.
For me it still always defaults to the downstem voice, and I continually have to check it. Even after doing it for several years now, I still mess this up.
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