I tried to enter in the same voice stem up or stem down, and I’m aware that the insertion caret shows what voice number and stem direction will be entered, but it didn’t seem to give me a chance to enter notes in the same voice.
In any case, what I’m focused on right now is how to fix this to get rid of the rests (and presumably put things in the correct voices). In fact, I’m not ever sure what I’m looking at so an explanation would be helpful.
I’m focused on fixing it, not just knowing how to correctly enter it, because as a composer I do a lot of editing of music and trying experiments anyway, so it’s important to know how to edit and fix things. If I can understand what I’m looking at here, I’m sure I’ll figure out how to correctly enter it next time.
It looks like the Db Eb and Ab in the lower staff are in a 3rd voice. Select those and move them to the downstem voice 2: right click: Voices → Change Voice.
To add to @derAbgang’s suggestion: you can also select the three notes and press V one or two times (utill the notes are in the correct downstem voice).
Without seeing the actual project (even just this one measure), it’s tough to say, but it looks like the C, 3rd beat, bass staff is in the same voice as the rests. Or, you have a hidden note on the 3rd beat in Voice 2 (although hiding a note isn’t something you would do by mistake).
The rests won’t go away because you still have notes in a third voice in the lower staff. The up stem voice one colour is red and the down stem voice two colour is purple. However you have an orange voice still in there so you need to change that one to purple and you have a purple note in voice one up stem you need to change to red. Once there are no more orange voices, all the orange rests will disappear. And once you fix it, so all the up stem voices are red, and all the down stem voices are purple, all the extraneous rests will disappear.
Oh, I see. I was focused on just beat 1 in which the notes were both in voice 1. Fixing beat 2 fixed it. Thanks.
By the way, sometimes I use F to flip stem directions, but it looks like that doesn’t actually change the voice status. In other words, “voice 1 stem up” stays “voice 1 stem up” even when pressing F.
I see there’s a menu option to swap voices. Can that also be used to swap stem up and stem down?
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but voices are created per staff, not per measure.
Each staff starts out with a single voice (upstem voice 1). If you select a note and press V, nothing will happen, because there’s no voice to shift it to. If you press Shift+V, then Dorico creates downstem voice 1 and moves the notes to that voice.
Now the staff has two voices created, so if you select a note in upstem voice 1 (in any measure in that staff) and press V, the note will be moved to downstem voice 1.
You can experiment with these commands to see what happens. If you have voice colors on, you’ll see the notes switch voices, and the status bar at the bottom will always tell you what voice a note is in (if you have just a single note selected).
Well, what I’m observing is that I had every measure in the document looking great except for one measure that had extra unwanted rests in voice 2 or 3, so it seems like the number of voices is related to the specific measure. But maybe you’re saying that pressing V in any other measure would have included cycling through voice 3 because it was in one measure in the staff. I’ll try it.
EDIT: I tried it! There was one measure of voice 2, and sure enough in a different measure, V cycled through voice 2.
What I learned was that if voice 3 is in use anywhere in the staff, then pressing V on any measure will cycle through voice 3 even if there’s no voice 3 anywhere in that measure to start.
Another point of confusion. It seems like it doesn’t consider a different stem direction to be a new voice. So if I have entered voice 1 stems up, and now I want to enter stems down, I should not press Shift-V while looking at the insertion caret, but just press V to get a new stem direction.
Also this leaves me unclear what the swap voices option does. Does it swap stems up and stems down, or, say, voices 1 and 2?
Also it seems that pressing F doesn’t change the voice status. If the note is “stems up voice 1” it will stay that way even if I flip the stem with F, I think.
Upstem Voice 1 is a voice, and Downstem Voice 1 is a different voice. Think of these as “default up- and down-stem voices.” Each unique voice is defined in two ways: whether it is up- or down-stem, and what number up/down it is. These are all unique.
You can also have only Upstem Voice 1 and Upstem Voice 2 in a staff. I regularly need this.
If you have only an Upstem Voice 1 (the default) and have not yet created any additional voices, you do indeed need to use Shift-V to create a downstem voice. While you are acclimating to Dorico’s use of voices, I recommend always checking to see what voices you have by right-clicking anywhere on the staff and selecting Voices > Change Voice. That will show you all the available voices in use in the staff:
Here you can see I have 4 voices in use. I also recommend turning on View > Note and Rest Colors > Voice Colors (edit: which I see in your OP that you’ve done). I really don’t like the default colors, but you can change these in Preferences.
When you select notes in two voices and use Swap Voice Contents, it will do a direct swap of these two voices. If you select more than two voices, I don’t believe anything will happen (which makes sense… that would be a mess).
Correct, F just changes stem direction, not the voice itself. F also allows you to change things from above the staff to below it, and vice versa.
