No matter what direction I choose for the stems when creating a new voice the stems are still distributed up and down in the voice in a piano score. How does one pin them to always have the same direction?
Andrew
You can’t, at the moment: Dorico will only use the voice’s specific direction when multiple voices are active.
Can you describe the circumstances in which you want to force all stems up or down by default when only a single voice is active? The only kind of music I can think of that does this is Renaissance black/white notation, but there are plenty of other aspects of that kind of notation that Dorico doesn’t handle at the moment in any case…
There have been several discussions over at Notatio of deliberate nonstandard stem directions in 19th century piano music. Mostly speculation on composers’ intentions, and comparison of different editions. It does seem useful for showing a coherent line crossing staves, or covering a large range.
Here is an example of when I want all stems up, very tall stems since there has to be room for a variety of playing techniques mixed. It could be placed on a regular staff, but preferably on something else, I’m not sure what would be possible pecussionwise.
Just in time before starting a new topic I saw that this question was asked before, I have exactly the same question as Andrew in 2016. Then this was not possible, but I think that was version 1, am I right in thinking that it is still not possible?
At least I could not find any preference for this.
The reason for asking is that in “our” scores (carillon music) it is a sort of convention to have the stems per voice (almost) always pointing in the same direction. I think that it is nowhere prescribed or a “rule”, but it is used often. As @Mark_Johnson seven years ago wrote it can be useful for showing the different voices and lines, carillon music (especially baroque arrangements) is rather often in three voices, upper two in upper staff for the fists, lower in lower staff for the pedals. But the two upper voices are not playing always together but in an imitating way, so the switching of stems can be confusing or better if there is no switching of stems it is immediately clear what voice you are playing. Since the compass of the instrument is not that big (4-5 octaves) there are only ledger lines needed in the upper regions of the treble, very seldom in the bass, therefore it mostly is no problem that the stems are pointing in the “wrong” direction!
One can create multiple upstem voices.
One can force stems to point up, if not automatically, then by filtering for a voice and applying Force Stem Up.
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Ah, had not found that one, in the myriad of possibilities!
Thanks that works like a charm, and saves lots of time also…