Short version: I’ve created three voices (vocal) on a single staff, one up-stem, two down. I’ve enabled condensing in the layout. I’d like to have all the voices share stems; makes it much more readable. Even getting the two down-stem voices to share a stem would be a big improvement. Based on other posts, I tried manual condensing, but I apparently didn’t activate it correctly, because I don’t see any condensing groups in the left panel of the condensing change dialog. I’m wondering if I should change all the voices to a single stem direction first?
Welcome to the forum.
If I understand correctly, you should be able to select all voices, then choose one voice stem for all three. That should make all 3 voices share the same stem. If you have one voice in in one stave and the other two on another stave, do the same with just the two voices sharing the stave.
I think there’s a misunderstanding here about how condensing works.
Condensing is meant to take music that is for different players, on different staves, and show it on fewer staves; often this means something like letting two different flute players share the same staff in the score. It does not work with music written in multiple voices in a single staff, as you have.
If you want your three voices to share a stem, you need to manually combine them into chords in a single voice. One way of doing this is to select all the notes, filter for downstem voice 1 (in your case), and then press V twice to move those notes into upstem voice 1. Then select all again and filter for downstem voice 2, and press V once to move those notes into upstem voice 1. (V cycles selected notes through the available voices.)
Another approach would be to create two additional voice players, and then use selecting, filtering, and cut/paste to distribute your three voices to three players/staves. Then you can use condensing to present them on a single staff in a given layout.
In the future, starting from scratch, you could just enter these lines as chords. Or you could assign them to separate players to begin with, and then use condensing to present them in a single staff.
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Been out of town, just now getting back to this. The filter-for-stem, then cycling through the voices (“v”) seems to be working! Thanks a bunch.
I’ve not tried entering voices in chords; I’ll have to look that up for next time.
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