Identify voices in barbershop etc

Dorico
1

I have come from Finale and work with barbershop. I’ve only gotten up to trying to set up barbershop template (2 staffs,2 voices per staff) and am now having problems with entering notes for each voice (tenor, lead, baritone, bass). If I select add voice or then try to enter for a specific voice I have no clue what voice I’m working with. Is there a way to identify voices with the part labels (i.e., tenor, lead, etc). When I pressed V to go to a voice there doesn’t seem to be anything to let me know what voice I’m working with. Gets extremely confusing. And I notice that if, for example, I select a quarter note, Dorico will not always enter a quarter note, sometimes putting two eighth notes and playing around with rests. When I’ve selected a quarter note, that’s what I want in the music, not two eighth notes.

I’ve read claims that Dorico is intuitive. At this early stage I think it’s counter-intuitive making what should be reasonable easy to do very difficult.

1 Like
2

It’s to be expected that after many years of using Finale, using any other software is going to feel difficult. It will start to click for you soon, I promise!

When you’re inputting notes, the orange caret shows you which voice you’re inputting into: there is a small note to the left of the bottom of the caret line which shows whether you are inputting into an up- or down-stem voice. You hit V to cycle between them. When the caret is not visible, V also cycles the selected note or notes between voices. Keep an eye on the caret, and it’ll be clear. This video shows how voices work:

When you input a note, Dorico considers the metrical structure of the bar and will automatically choose the notation that makes the structure clearest based on context. This is all controlled by options on the Note Grouping page of Library > Notation Options. It does take some getting used to when coming from another notation program, but soon I think you’ll find it quite liberating: you only have to worry about specifying the actual duration of the note, and let Dorico worry about how best to notate it.

Reasonable people can disagree about these conventions, of course, which is why it’s a good idea to spend a bit of time reviewing those settings and adjusting them to suit your own tastes.

If all else fails, you can activate Force Duration (shortcut O), which tells Dorico to notate rhythms exactly as you specify them, and not apply the settings from Notation Options. Here’s a video about Force Duration:

3

To help you see what’s going on, try View > Note and rest colours > voice colours.

1 Like
4

An example of how this might look is in the manual:

You can customise voice colours too, if you like:

5

Can the voice colors be different for each staff (like treble staff and bass staff) rather than being the same for the 1st, 2nd voices on both staffs? And I still don’t see where there is indication of which voice I’m using and how I can set the stem direction for each voice.

6

Bobs,
if you have a look at your caret, whilst inputting your music, it gives you the clue.

7

@BobS no, each staff has its own set of voices.

Here are examples of what the caret looks like when inputting different voices:

You can also check the voice of notes outside of note input by selecting a note, then looking in the status bar (bottom left of the window).

8

If you really want that, you can use a single instrument with 2 staves such as piano, and just add the 8-clef (with octave offset in Properties) at the beginning. You’d also want to change the brace to a bracket …

9

Daniel, it just occurred to me that it might be useful to color the little voice indicator in the color of the voice as it is appearing on the screen?

2 Likes
10

:thinking: no, that would be information overload. The little numbers are a gentle reminder of something one does not really need to know. For Engraving it doesn’t make a difference, wether one uses up-stem voice 1 or 2. Only if one wants to tinker with the playback it makes sense to show voice colours.

11

The use of colours needs to be considered carefully, including for reasons of accessibility.

I remember it being requested before to change the caret colour (or at least the voice indicator) to match voice colours, so we’re aware of the request.

12

Barbershopper here – When doing note entry, V cycles between the up-stem and down-stem voice. Press Shift-N to start note entry, then look below the caret. Below the caret, you’ll see a quarter note. The quarter note isn’t there to show duration - it’s there to show up-stem and down-stem voices. If you’ve set up multiple voices in your score, press V a few times and you’ll see the stem change from up to down. That up-stem or down-stem corresponds to the voice part: up-stem for tenor and baritone; down-stem for lead and bass. Colors can help, but Dorico assigns the colors – it’s not like Finale’s Preferences where you can say: Layer 1 is always up-stem and always this color.

13

Good to have a barbershopper providing help. I set up a new topic about where the project info goes that you enter with ctrl-I.

14

Actually, check out the Preferences in Dorico. There are some changes you can do to the colours lately.