I am having problems occasionally with voices and slurs. Generally everything goes well, but occasionally I start a slur then use the key commands to move the right end of it across to the end of the phrase, but the slur will stop at the end of a bar and not move on. I am presuming this is related to how the voices were input (up to 3 voices per stave). I have played around with the Voice settings (swap voice contents, order, and trying most of the up and down stems when they are not correct for some reason). Sometimes I end up deleting all but one voice and inputting the others, only to find the noteheads misalign. Other times I delete the contents of the bar and start again, with the slurs then behaving traveling on to the next measure, other times not.
I am aware of stem up or down when putting in voices, but what is a good way to do all this? I am suspecting you have to pay attention to slurs and voices as you input so they can connect. Do slurs only stay with the same voice? (yes I have also been moving them manually in Engrave, but not sure this would be best practice).
Also when I get misaligned noteheads, what do you do?
I am probably confused also about the Voice swap settings and all the listing voices for up and down stem, so randomly trying them all is not a very good idea because I do not know what I am doing.
It is possible to slur notes of different voices. Select the first note where slur should start and the last note with Command-click where the slur should end no matter if these notes belong to the same voice then hit S.
But I must admit that sometimes the behavior of slurs changes. I just played around a bit. And sometimes I could lengthen the slur between voices with Shilft-Alt-arrow and the other time after having deleted the slur and reinput it I could not lengthen it anymore. Strange.
arco, it does sound as if you’ve got in a bit of a muddle with your use of voices. Dorico is very flexible in this regard – much more so than other scoring programs – but with that flexibility certainly comes the possibility for you to get in a real mess.
If you haven’t already, I suggest you try switching on View > Note and Rest Colors > Voice Colors, which will show you which voice is where.
I don’t know what kind of music you’re inputting, but if it’s using a reasonably standard melody-accompaniment texture, then one way to think of it is that the melody should generally speaking go in one voice, probably the first stem-up voice, and you should try to use this as consistently as possible. Then add in secondary stem-down and, if needed, stem-up voices as needed for the more complex bits of the texture.
You should be able to use the Edit > Voices > Change Voice feature to straighten things out.
Thanks Daniel. I have been using multiple voices for a while now with up to 4 voices per stave, with reasonable success. My problems have arisen by sometimes the slur not moving on to the next measure with the new key command to move it to the next note, I assumed presumably because it does not know what voice to connect to. Would this be correct?
This has made me look at all the Voice options (right click) and try swap and voice order. I forgot about colors to help me.
Can you tell me the easiest way to do this or fix this?
Is it best to input each phrase that requires a slur continuing measure by measure until it stops? I have been doing a few measures at a time with a voice, then go back and put in the next voice, not particularly needing to be aware of which voice Dorico is using, then trying to put in the slurs.
As ReiRei already mentioned, the way to do this slur is (in Write Mode) to click on the first of the desired slurred notes and then Cmd-click (CTRL-click in Windows) on the last note of the anticipated slur. Then press the S-key. That should draw a slur between the two notes regardless of the voice they are assigned to.
Yes, that’s right. A slur will only advance to other notes in the same voice with the current set of key commands, but as Derrek points out, you can easily create a slur that spans multiple voices by selecting the note on which you want the slur to start, then Ctrl+clicking the note on which you want the slur to end, whatever voice or staff it may be in, and finally hitting S to create the slur.
Thanks everyone I had forgotten about the Ctrl click. I must have used this in the past looking at what I have previously did, but (promptly) forgot about it because of using the key command to move the end.
