Easy way to voice chords

Dorico
1

I’m doing a lot of orchestration of string accompaniment at the moment. It’s all triadic: usually the double basses and cellos play the root, then I voice the other notes among the violins and violas. Normally some kind of open voicing for strings. I do something similar on trombones, and trumpets, but often with closed voicing.

Is there any easy way to spread a triadic chord over multiple instruments? Can, or could, the other instruments voice themselves intelligently? (i.e. Ideally, if I voice a ‘higher’ note for the violas, the violins would move up to their next closed-voice positions.)

I’ve added the chords above the stave, so Dorico has the basic progression.

At the moment, I hack around, playing all the notes across multiple octaves, and then cherry-picking the voices I want. Is there a better way?

2

You can use the Explode feature to distribute the notes between the different staves, then if you don’t like the voicing you end up with, you can select a pair of notes at the same position on different staves and use Edit > Paste Special > Swap to swap the notes over. If you’re doing a lot of this kind of work, you will probably find it useful to define custom key commands for these features.

3

Thanks Daniel! I usually keep all the voices on one staff, until I’m ready to distribute them to different instruments. Thanks for pointing out explode and reduce though; that will come in handy.

I thought there might be an easier way to generate the chords with partially-opened or closed voicing. I’ve created a couple of AHK macros to see me through for the time-being:

; Closed voice triad
+Down::
  ClipSaved := ClipboardAll
  Send q^c^v!{Up 2}^c^v!{Up 2}^c^v!{Up 3}q
  Clipboard := ClipSaved
  ClipSaved := ""
return

; Open voice triad
+Up::
  ClipSaved := ClipboardAll
  Send q^c^v!{Up 4}^c^v!{Up 5}^c^v!{Up 5}q
  Clipboard := ClipSaved
  ClipSaved := ""
return