Managing voices for two hand piano piece

[gka]

I’m quite new to Dorico, started writing a piano piece for two hands (treble and bass clefs). Inputing some notes manually some via midi keyboard. The problem I face is that some chords when entered via midi keyboard was treated as just for treble staff. If I try to move some chord notes to lower staff - they still share the same stem with the notes in the treble staff. So then I try to create a separate voice (for notes moved to bass clef), but still unsure - should I choose new up-stem or down-stem voice for bass clef?

I don’t want to explicitly set or force the up or down stems, I want to leave that for Dorico to find out, I just want to disconnect the stem. What about already existing notes in the bass clef? Should I change the voice for them too?

Another thing - when I switch to ‘show voice colors’ - I don’t understand what they mean, what’s the purpose of this function, because it seems impossible to get consistent two colors - one for right hand, one for left hand. Even if I select the same voice for lower staff notes - they have different colors:

And one more thing - I’ve read in the other thread that to get rid of those second voice rests you just have to select first note and switch ‘starts voice’ toggle on, but for me this toggle switch is stubborn - it just toggles back to initial state

I’m sure I’m doing something wrong, but I’m motivated to learn and would be grateful if anybody could point me to the right direction or maybe explain how can I fix this.

[Derrek]

In the case above, try switching the notes from the top staff to the bottom by selecting the notes and pressing ALT/OPT + M to move the C and D from the upstem chord in the top staff to join the upstem note in the lower staff.

Sometimes one wants two voices with stems in the opposite direction; at other times one wants to combine everything in to one voice. Voice colors are an excellent way to keep track of various voices for those who can differentiate colors. I don’t worry too much about what the colors are so long as I keep track of which color represents the first upstem voice on each staff.

[mducharme]

I think the cause of the problem is that you were probably just hitting M and N instead of ALT/OPT M and ALT/OPT N. Plain M and N are for doing cross-staff voicings where the note is still technically in the original staff but is displayed as though it is in the other, used for beaming things together across staves, like this:

[gka]

Yes, indeed, I was just hitting M and N! Thank you!