Every stave of every instrument starts with a single up-stem voice (known as Up-stem voice 1).
There are a few ways to achieve a down-stem voice:
- By hitting Shift-V during note input.
- By selecting a note or passage and going Edit/Right click > Voices > Change Voice > New Down-stem voice. [This changes the voice of just the selection]
- By selecting a note or passage and going Edit/Right click > Voices > Default Stems Down. [This redefines the whole voice as a Down-stem voice and renames it as Down-stem voice 1]
Other possibilities for the creation of additional voices include:
4. Use of the Explode/Reduce functions.
5. MusicXML Import. I recommend checking imported MusicXML material very carefully with voice colours turned on. You may not be able to make all the voices blue, but as long as each staff is consistent with itself (e.g. the Flute 1 is the same colour from beginning to end) you’re at least only dealing with one voice. Then, if you’re going to be copying and pasting from one instrument to another instrument, check both voices are defined as Up-stem Voice 1 - you can see this in the status bar at the bottom of the screen.
One voice is always considered to be the primary voice. It will continue padding with rests for the entire length of the flow. When you introduce a second voice but stop adding notes to the first voice, the first voice will end of the last bar in which it contains notes.
By way of an example:
The blue voice is Up-stem voice 1
The red voice is Down-stem voice 1
Up-stem voice 1 (blue) is the primary voice until Down-stem voice 1 (red) appears - and because at this point there’s only one voice visible at any one time, the nominal stem direction is irrelevant.
When I copy and paste three Up-stem Voice 1 notes to the middle of bar 4, Dorico no longer truncates Up-stem voice 1 at the end of bar 2; it extends the voice all the way through to the beginning of bar 5 (and beyond, given there are no more notes in Down-stem Voice 1).
One solution is to select bars 3 and 4 and use Edit > Remove Rests, but this is a sticking plaster - it doesn’t solve the underlying problem, which is that I’m working with multiple voices when a single voice would do the job better. A better solution would be to select the whole passage and go Edit (or right click) > Voices > Change Voice > Up-stem Voice 1.
My suspicion is that - even if each of your staves only has a single voice - some of them are defined as Up-stem voices and some of them are defined as Down-stem voices. When you copy and paste from one stave to another, Dorico tries to maintain the nominal voice direction. You should fix by redefining all the voices in the project as Up-stem voices (assuming there are no genuine multiple voice situations on individual staves).
No, I don’t work for Steinberg, and I don’t have your personal details.
If you click on your face/avatar in the top right corner of this browser, then the head and shoulders icon, then Preferences:
Click the Email section in the left menu, and I suspect you’ll see a screen like this:
I"m pretty sure I’ve never changed these, so your settings will probably be similar. Specifically
Send me an email when someone quotes me, replies to my post, mentions my @username, or invites me to a topic.
This means that when someone replies generally to the thread (as I’m doing now), you won’t be sent an email, but when somebody replies directly to your posts (etc.) you’ll be sent an email.
This is the forum’s doing, not mine, and you have control over these notifications.