Notes disappearing when using Swap on selections with both Up-stem and Down-stem Notes

[Michael_J_Lloyd]

I’ve been experiencing a strange behavior and haven’t found other forum posts about it, so I’ve created one, in case it’s useful to anyone else. This seems to me like a bug that needs to be fixed.

My workflow is to import a cleaned up MIDI file into my template, and then move things around between staves so that I can create a sketch to orchestrate from. I find myself using the commands Swap and Move to Staff Above/Below frequently. I’ve noticed some troubling behaviour when trying to do this in places where there are differing rhythms in a bar, in which Dorico has imported the MIDI with both up-stem and down-stem voices.

When I try to use Swap with everything in the bar selected, the notes that were down-stem will completely disappear after the command is run. If I change everything to up-stem first, all notes are retained when using Swap. Additionally, if I filter and move the down-stem voices to another staff by themselves initially, then they behave normally.

Here’s a couple of examples.

How the MIDI imported (these are strings):

When I used Swap to move it to another staff, only the up-stem part is retained:

When I made all parts up-stem, it looked like this, and using Swap retained all notes are they look below:

Additionally, if I move that material as Dorico originally notated it (with both up and down-stem voices) using Move to Staff Above/Below, it changes it all be up-stem voices, and retains everything so that it looks like the above screenshot.

Here’s another, more complex, example, with tremolo strings. It imports like this:

When I use Swap, the down-stem voices disappear:

If I instead do Move to Staff Above, it again makes them all up-stem, which retains all notes:

Has anyone else experienced this behaviour? I don’t mind if Dorico wants everything to be up-stem notes to retain all voices, but my main issue with this is that I want to use Swap to move things across multiple staves and that just doesn’t seem to work properly. I will add that using Copy or Cut and then the normal Paste command work just find and retain everything as it originally imports, so I suppose that’s an okay alternative.

[Christian_R]

@Michael_J_Lloyd

I’ve been experiencing a strange behavior and haven’t found other forum posts about it, […] This seems to me like a bug that needs to be fixed.

Hi @Michael_J_Lloyd, it is all expected behaviour.

1)

@Michael_J_Lloyd

When I used Swap to move it to another staff, only the up-stem part is retained:

The swap command is generally used to swap the music between two staves, and normally you only have one voice in each staff.

In your example you are swapping a two voice source into a one voice destination (selecting the bar rests probably): that’s why Dorico can only swap the voice that exists in the destination.

To confirm this, if you have already the 2 voices in the destination staff, swapping a 2 voice source will work as expected:

• So if you want to use swap when multiple voices are present, be sure that those voices exist in the destination staff (you can just temporarily create two notes in up-stem v.1 and Down-stem v.1)

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2)

@Michael_J_Lloyd

if I move that material as Dorico originally notated it (with both up and down-stem voices) using Move to Staff Above/Below, it changes it all be up-stem voices, and retains everything so that it looks like the above screenshot.

When you move to staff above/below consider this:

which is an excerpt from the Manual:

Moving notes/items to other staves - Dorico Pro - 6.1

• So, if you want to use move to staff a./b. you may want to use the Filter>Voices functionality, and move one voice at a time assigning it to the correct voice, once it is at destination, before moving the other voice: or just move to staff a./b. first, and then use the Filter>Notes in Chord functionality to reassign the voices as desired.

---

Fazit:
For such cases as you describe, possibly a simple cut/paste is much faster/simpler.

[Michael_J_Lloyd]

Thanks for your response, @Christian_R. That is unfortunate that this is an expected behavior, given that there could be a time, albeit a rarity, when I’d want to swap a multi-voice part in Piano with a single voice part in the Celesta or Harp, for example, or vice versa.

My thinking in using the Swap function rather than a Cut-Paste combo is that there’s less of a chance of accidentally pasting things into the wrong bar by doing it in one stroke with both the target bar and notes simultaneously selected, but given the limitations, I may have to concede and just do it that way.

[Christian_R]

@Michael_J_Lloyd

when I’d want to swap a multi-voice part in Piano with a single voice part in the Celesta or Harp, for example, or vice versa.

@Michael_J_Lloyd

My thinking in using the Swap function rather than a Cut-Paste combo is that there’s less of a chance of accidentally pasting things into the wrong bar by doing it in one stroke with both the target bar and notes simultaneously selected, but given the limitations, I may have to concede and just do it that way.

You can do as I suggested:

@Christian_R

So if you want to use swap when multiple voices are present, be sure that those voices exist in the destination staff (you can just temporarily create two notes in up-stem v.1 and Down-stem v.1)

It takes 5 seconds to add (temporarily) 2 notes in two voices for the destination staff (you need to do it only once per flow).

Edit:
actually you just need to add one note in another voice (so it takes only 3 seconds):

[Michael_J_Lloyd]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, @Christian_R , I appreciate your spending the time to look into solutions. I think I came up with a solution that should work given the mechanics of what I’m trying to achieve and how many times I’ll need to use Swap in the course of working on condensing MIDI for a single cue (maybe 50 times or more, on many different staves?), which I will write below, in case it’s of use to anyone that comes across the same issue. Your mentioning that having both up and down-stems notes causing things to be lost when using Swap was really the key to figuring it out, so thanks again for that. And if I run into this weird scenario you illustrated above, I’ll use your method!

I looked at the MIDI import settings for these kind of MIDI tracks where this was occuring, focusing on the “Voice separation mode” setting. I previously had it set to “4 voice keyboard (auto),” which I found generally worked pretty well for almost everything, with the except for it creating up and down-stem voices, which I think now best to avoid because I’d still like to use Swap in the way I describe above. I also tried setting it to “2 voice (fixed split point),” which yielded better results for keeping both staves to one voice (all up-stem), but it created other minor issues for how some of the notation imported.

My solution is to keep it set as “4 voice keyboard (auto),: and, depending on the complexity of the cue, either selecting all notes or just specific sections, filtering down-stem notes, and then changing them to up-stem. Then I can continue to use Swap without worrying about losing some of the information, and, thanks to Dorico’s handling of notes as a single entity based on duration, when I end up splitting things out when orchestrating later, the notation will look fine without my having to adjust much of anything.