In the lower percussion line, I’ve got cymbals and bass drum set up. Once the bass drum enters in bar 127, it’s decided to put itself in some sort of Voice 2, which I can’t alter; what I want is for it to show as it does in bar 87. The bar rests won’t delete. But if I delete the empty bars (from say bar 153), the formatting corrects itself. If I delete the cymbal strike in bar 100, the formatting also corrects itself. I can’t spot what’s going on here; the upper percussion line is fine.
Bass drum rests.zip (404 KB)
I don’t see any notes in bar 87, so I’m not sure exactly what you want, but you can edit the default stem direction of instruments in a percussion kit by finding the player in Setup mode, opening its card, and clicking on the name of the kit (the little green label beneath the name of the player) and choosing Edit Percussion Kit. In there you can select each instrument and specify its default stem direction.
If you want cymbal and bass drum to share a voice, you can specify that as well by ensuring that the number beside ‘Stem direction and voice’ is set to the same value for both instruments.
Ah. The bar numbers are placed very oddly so what I thought is bar 87 is actually bar 58 (the number 87 sits on top of the actual bar 58).
I don’t need cymbal and BD to share a voice (I carefully created an Empty Kit) but I do want to ‘remove rests’ and in bar 113 (what I’d thought was bar 140), I can’t - I can’t do anything at all with those rests since nothing appears in the Properties panel, and bars 113 onwards look pretty daft. But if I delete from bar 126 to the end (these bars are currently empty), the second voice rests disappear anyway - see what happens in bar 97 (figure 9) or bar 118 (4 bars after fig 11) after deleting from bar 126 to end.
Why? What’s going on?
The issue is that once the cymbal is introduced, the up-stem voice to which the cymbal belongs is active, and so you’re going to get rests from then on. I wonder whether you would actually be better off specifying that the bass drum and cymbal should in fact be in the same voice via the Edit Percussion Kit dialog, and then only when they play notes simultaneously, you could select e.g. the bass drum note at that rhythmic position and choose Edit > Percussion > Change Voice > Extra Down-stem Voice (which will avoid introducing any new rests).
OK, I’ll probably do that - thanks.
But I just don’t see why deleting the empty bars, following introducing both instruments, makes the rests disappear? What’s causing that?
The cymbal has another note in bar 135. When that note is present, the region between bar 69, where the cymbal has its first note, and bar 135, where it has its next note, will be padded.
Ah! Thanks. 