Dorico treats my harp as two players instead of one. what am I doing wrong?

Hi, I am doing something wrong in Dorico and don’t have a clue how to sort this out.

I’m trying to write a harp part with cross-staff notation.

But whenever I move notes to the lower staff, Dorico treats them as a different voice, so I cannot apply a single slur across both staves.

Tuplets also get split.

How can I unify the voices so that a single slur can cover notes on both staves, like in standard harp notation?

I would like something like this.

Maybe are you typing Alt+M instead of just M?

N/M = cross to staff above/below
Alt+N/Alt+M = move to staff above/below

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At the very least, you should be able to draw a slur by selecting the first note, then Command-click (CTRL click on Win) on the last note, then press S to draw a slur between them, regardless of voice.

Or draw the slur, then apply the cross staff.

But I get this by default: all in the same voice. I’ll have to manually adjust the slur, admittedly, but there’s no problem withe notes, voices or tuplets.

Are you sure you’re using N to move the notes? Not Alt-N…? And this is definitely one instrument, not two staves joined together?

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Nope. This is what I have if I press N.

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You should only select the notes that you want to have on the upper dtaff before pressing N. Here, you’ve selected all the notes, so they all move to the upper staff :person_shrugging:

Enable voice colors, so that you see that they are all in the same voice (it’s easier to slur and tie, and the only way to have centered beams when needed). Here, it seems you are using two different voices, which is totally useless (and a source of some tidying after the fact to remove unwanted/unneeded rests).

Hope it helps!

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Start with all the notes in the lower staff, in the same voice. Then select the ones you want to move up, and press N.

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This is what I get.

  1. Enter all notes/slurs on the lower staff.
  2. Set beaming and tuplet properties to suit.
  3. Select the notes to cross-staff and hit N (repeat for each group)
  4. Adjust slurs/tuplet positions in Engrave.
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The solution was to start all over again and write notes ONLY in one of the staff (not on both), so then I can move the notes I want up and down another staff. I wrote the notes with the mouse and Dorico thought there was two voices.

Thanks.

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