How does Dorico decide which voice is active?

Dorico
1

I write a lot of polyphonic keyboard music with multiple voices on each staff; which involves me switching between voices often. Whenever I click on a staff with my mouse, some voice will be active, ready to be edited. But on the face of it, there seems little rhyme or reason to which voice this is. It seems to be neither consistently the last voice edited nor consistently the one closest to where I click.

So how does Dorico decide which voice is active when I click? In any case, perhaps in a later version there could be some “intelligent” guessing on Dorico’s part which voice should be active. For example, if I shorten a note in one voice (resulting in a rest), and then fiddle about with another voice, I would like Dorico to make the former voice again upon clicking; so that I may fill up the rest with other notes.

2

Hi Kim,
Some tips here that might help :
• Turn voice colours on (view menu)
• Check the little note next to the caret (on its bottom left). It does show whether it’s an up-stem or a down-stem voice that is selected, and its number.
• Check the status bar (a string of text at the bottom of Dorico’s window), the active voice is also described there.

I believe the voices are active in a consistent pattern, although it might not be obvious. I’d say that the first voice is the default voice (you can change whether it’s up-stem or dow-stem in the voice sub-menu, in context menu) and then in the order or creation of the voices of the staff.

Hope it helps!

3

If you select a note or rest, that voice will be active.

Otherwise, AFAIK Dorico “re-activates” the voice that was active previously on the same staff.