Glitch with stem direction when doing cross-staff notation

Dorico
1

Experiencing a bug when moving notes between the treble staff of the piano down to the bass staff using “M”. Bass staff note stems collide with the treble staff notes being moved down, as if on purpose they’ll even flip intentionally to get in the way.

Same issue doesn’t happen when bringing bass staff notes up using “N” (this works great!)

See video:

2

What voices are the notes in each stave?

3

Only using voice 1 in each

4

Are you using just M, which keeps the notes associated with the treble staff, or ALT/OPT + M, which reassigns the notes to the bass clef?

If you cannot post an excerpt to let us fool with the problem, can you at least post an image with voice colors turned on? That would be helpful.

1 Like
5

I can confirm this behaviour.
But if the notes in the lower stave are in a Downstem voice, the issue doe not occur.

1 Like
6

Just M. I still want the notes associated with the treble staff

7

Ok, here is a more thorough video describing the behaviour.
I realize there are workarounds (like inputting the music into a downstem voice, or flipping the stems manually), though, this seems like something that should be more intuitive. Again, the workflow going from bass to treble is smooth. Not so going from treble to bass.

https://youtu.be/y5ZJn__Hlbg

8

Bumping this post. Behavior still present in version 5.1.20

9

When only one voice is present on a staff, then the stem direction for the notes depends on the position on the staff. When more than one voice is present, then the stem direction depends on the stem direction that is built-in to the voice, unless it has been crossed from a different staff in which case it “points back” to its home staff. By default, all instruments in Dorico start off with just one voice on each staff, and the stem direction that is built-in to that one voice is stem-up. So what’s happening here is that when you cross the notes from the top staff onto the bottom staff, the notes that have been crossed will “point back” to the top staff, i.e. they will be stem-up, and the notes on the bottom staff will draw using their built-in stem direction, which is also stem-up. So basically you want to either flip the notes that are on the bottom staff, or move them into a stem-down voice instead.

2 Likes
10

I’m having a similar problem:

Ekran Resmi 2024-11-06 12.40.39
Ekran Resmi 2024-11-06 12.40.391688×462 46.1 KB

Here I have a bar with only one voice in each staff (up stem). When I hit M to one or two notes selected in the first group of stems in the right hand -the staccato notes, for ex-, they go to the botton staff without changing stem direction. Even if I flip direction (F), it doesn’t help. However, as you can see, starting from the second group of stems, there is successful cross-staffing between hands, with the beams positioned in the middle of both staves -which is what I want. What’s keeping Dorico from behaving the same throughout the bar?

This was a Finale XML import, by the way. Could it be XML import settings? I had selected to keep stem directions as is, when importing. Which caused me a lot of trouble: When I change the music, the stem direction won’t adjust anymore! Is there a way to say “cancel the choice I made when importing. Adjust stems as usual now”?

11

Select All, then do Edit > Notations > Stem > Remove Forced Stem

1 Like
12

Thanks so much @Richard_Lanyon !