Stem direction on tied notes

[pianosafari]

I have four measure of tied chords divided between the hands. The RH plays four notes in the treble clef with the stems up, and the LH plays four notes also in the treble clef with the stems down. This works correctly for the first two measures, but in measures 3-4 the LH stems flip up. I can’t force them down. When I untie the chords, the LH stems all flip down correctly, but when they are tied the same error happens. Does anyone know how to fix this?

[asherber]

It looks like you probably have the last two LH bars in the wrong voice, an upstem voice instead of the downstem voice of the first two bars.

When I enter the RH all in upstem voice 1 and the LH all in downstem voice 1, I get:

But if I put the last two bars in upstem voice 2, I get what you have. You’ll be able to tell easily if you turn on voice colors.

If that’s not the issue, can you upload your project, or a cut-down version of it that demonstrates the issue (maybe just those 4 bars)?

[pianosafari]

Thank you, I appreciate your response! I turned on the voice colors, and it shows they are correct, but the stems are still flipped incorrectly. When I untie them, those stems in m. 3-4 flip back down. Any other ideas? I’ve tried deleting bars 3-4 and reentering, but the same issue occurs.

[asherber]

Can you upload your project, or a cut-down version of it that demonstrates the issue?

[Michel_Edward]

you could also try selecting the entire row of tied chords, then in the context menu, selecting “stems” and removing forced stems.

[Christian_R]

Hi @pianosafari, try to switch to Engrave mode, then from there, select the desired chords and reset the stems directions (right click>Stems> Remove Forced Stems): sometimes different forced stems created in engrave mode in conjunction with tie chains are only resettable from Engrave mode.

For reference see this posts (and the correlated thread):

Stem direction conumdrum

Hi @Kerry_Moffit, switch the view to Transposed Pitch (bottom left), then, after doing Select All in Write mode, switch to Engrave mode before you do right click>Stem>Remove Forced Stems: possibly some properties inherited from the XML (especially for the subsequent notes in a tie chain) are being considered/translated as “engraving” ones and will be reset only in Engrave mode .

Stem direction conumdrum

@Christian_R pointed out something very interesting. I’ve just run several tests again (it’s the same whether it’s Locally or Globally). The result of Remove Forced Stem is better in Engrave Mode than in Write Mode for the specific case of tied notes (admittedly for some oddities coming from an XML, but it interests me because I’ve had the same issues before). I applied Reset Appearance and Reset Position before testing, just for clarity (no changes in that area between Write and Engrave). Ori…

Edit: Here a short visual explanation on what is happening:

Forced stems (created in Engrave mode) vs tie chains:

[pianosafari]

Thank you! I entered engrave mode and chose “remove forced stems” and nothing happened, but then when I tried to force the stem down again, it worked. It is interesting because the force stem down was not working originally. Everything is fixed now, though! I appreciate your advice.

[asherber]

FWIW, you shouldn’t need to force stems to get what you want; as I showed in my first screenshot, it works for me out of the box.

But we’d need to see a project file in order to determine why it’s not working for you.