Start Voice / End Voice

I can’t for the life of me figure out what Start Voice / End Voice is for. If this has been covered here ad nauseam please steer me to the source.

I understand that if I hide rests with Edit > Remove Rests I can get the rests back selectively by clicking around with Start/End (which seems to me a convoluted way to get the rests back). Is that the only purpose for Start Voice / End Voice? If so, let me know and I will sleep well tonight.

Thanks ::: Bill

Maybe it’s just an easy way to remote rests: you can just toggle one of those properties and it should be done for you (I think) - rather than having to select all the rests etc…

That’s all I can think of!?

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It is literally a way to turn on and off a voice. If the voice is on, rests will appear wherever notes are lacking. If a voice is turned off, there are no notes and no rests wherever that condition applies.

This is particularly useful in keyboard works where the number of voices varies and can come in and out. Sometimes you want rests shown when a voice is silent (baroque fugue) and other times, you only want a voice to appear where it is needed (romantic piano works). In this latter case, turning a voice off when it is not needed can be useful. (This also means that you can reactivate that voice later rather than adding another voice entirely, keeping data a bit neater.)

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Romanos – That makes sense but I still don’t get it. Can you show me a tiny example of how this would work? ::: Bill

I withdraw my request. I can piddle around and sometimes make it work accidentally but I don’t know what I’m doing and I can live without this. In a pinch, I’ll make a round trip to Finale via XML. Thanks anyway.

Bill

Hi @billstevns, I made a detailed video to show how Start Voice/End Voice and Remove Rests work and correlate to each other.
(Generally it is suggested to use the Remove Rests command, because Start Voice in particular sometimes doesn’t work, as there are complex calculation that only Remove Rests can do *. You can then remove the Start or End Voice property, where needed):

(*) See also here:

Thanks to Christian and Romanos for your replies.

::: Bill

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