Moving horizontal voice order

In the weeds with a horizontal voice order question, that has several imbedded problems. (BTW - This project is an attempt at using an already published score to better learn Dorico, and attempt to make it look EXACTLY Like the original, so may be overriding Dorico’s defaults in ways that may not be possible - just trying to figure out what IS possible. Also I realize there are other problems with this small section (overlapping accents) - fixing one problem at a time.)

Here is a screenshot of the score:

When I originally input this, in the bass clef the down-stemmed quarter-note was after the up-stemmed half-note. I moved them to be in this order, and I now have a problem and some questions:

  • Problem - I cannot move it back. When in Engrave mode I have the horizontal spacing indicators, the square on the quarter note is red, but it does not have the vertical line and I cannot move it.
  • I would like to have only a single double-sharp on this note. It seems like no matter what I do, either the double-sharp on the quarter-note goes away, or they both disappear - exactly the opposite of what I want. (I used the bottom panel to hide)
  • Of course, I would also like the quarter note to be right up against the half-note , but cannot yet do that with the double-sharp in the way. (Unfortunately, fitting the round whole over the square peg did not solve the problem – the square peg is, indeed, too large.)
    One side-note – I do believe that I previously found a single command or button to use to switch voices horizontally before, but for the life of me cannot find it this time.

I think what you’re looking for is the Voice Column Index:

You can also hide accidentals via the Properties panel.

Select the red square and hit delete.

Select the note and use the Accidental Property (set to hide)

Right-click>Voices>Swap Voice Order

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If the square is red, it means it’s no longer in its original position. Please delete to make it blue again, because you’re going down a wrong (really wrong) path. Select the notes which order you wish to change >right-click >Voices>Swap voice order is what you are looking for.
[Edit] @Janus beat me to it

Thank you! Did not know about the selecting the red square and hitting delete to return to original position. Very logical.

I was also confused by the fact that the “swap voice order” is on the write tab and not the engrave tab. (I think I found it by accident the first time, and then thought it would be under the Engrave tab when I tried again). I assume moving the notes manually does not reset the “order” of the accidentals, and that is why, once moved manually, the accidentals did not behave as expected.

Another place where Dorico is very intelligent if you don’t try to fight it!

That is how I was doing it. See below for the reason it was not working as expected.

I just did a little experiment, and found out several very cool things…

Order of operations is important…

  • Swap voices first,
  • You have several option of what to select when swapping voices:. If you only select the noteheads (in this case the two Cx) then the noteheads end up on top of each other (useful if the same note value). If you select all of the notes in both voices they end up offset.
  • After you have swapped the voice order, select either notehead with the accidental, and the first accidental goes away.

Those of you who answered this question probably knew all of this already, but if anyone else searches this topic, it is a bit more info!

Swap voice order is a speedy shortcut (just like Remove Rests)
What’s really happening under the hood (or more precisely, on the bottom panel) is that the voice column indexes are swapped with this shortcut. But if you want (and you know what you are doing), you can perfectly attribute the voice column 2 to one voice, voice column 1 to the other (so that it sits before), etc… Just to make things more complete
And @Janus deserves the solution tick :wink:

John Ireland! :slight_smile: Even the published octavo is so many generations old, I can see why it needs to be recopied.

Yes. Some of our purchased copies are not that old but look like they are copies of copies of mimeographs of original plate engravings.