two-stave instruments (e.g., piano)

What is the best way to achieve dynamic differences between staves in a multi-stave instrument. Can you just apply different expression below each staff and that will give you what you want. Or is it more complicated than that.

I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that… as things stand, any dynamic will influence both staves. As each voice in play mode has its own lane, this indicates that we eventually will be able to route each voice to its own endpoint (VST, midi channel.) This isn’t implemented yet though…

Thanks, I realize that what’s coming will give us much more precise control over this stuff in play mode.

But I guess I’m thinking it would be really great if in the score we could indicate in a notes layer or something to emphasize the melody in this passage. Or bring out the bass line here. Or suppress the inner voices. I have written all over some scores from when I was a piano student these types of qualitative remarks.

If we could select a set of notes and mark them as melody, bass line or harmony. And then apply some qualitative expression which would boost or suppress the velocity by some percentage then that would go a long way to getting good results without a lot of midi editing.

This type of thing could work well with pianos and plucked instruments as you could do everything with velocity.

That’s a good idea. Being able to adjust key velocity for individual notes/voices is an absolute must for rendering piano music. Notation Composer e.g. has a very fast way of dealing with this right on the notation…

Certainly we do intend to make it possible to adjust the dynamics of individual notes in due course, and we also intend to make it possible to specify which voice a dynamic marking should apply to as well.

When applying a dynamic to a specific voice becomes possible, will one be able to apply a dynamic to multiple (but not all) voices on a staff (by checklist or some other means)? If not, one would need an option to hide duplicate (or perhaps all) dynamic markings.

At the moment, a dynamic can be either instrument-specific or voice-specific, and we don’t have a means of attaching the same dynamic to multiple but not all voices. I’m sure we will come up with some kind of solution to this in the fullness of time, though at the moment I’m not sure what shape it will take.