One of the flows of the orchestral score on which I’m working on shows no bar rest in the first measure (the music starts in the second measure). There are two instruments and one of them was written in an extra voice. If I put them both in the same voice, the rest magically reappears. Does anyone here know why this happens?
Select each of the first notes in turn. Do either of them have the property toggled for “Starts Voice”?
Hi Dan,
No, none of them do. I checked it (I thought that feature didn’t work in percussion parts).
Antonio
If you could cut down a copy of the score to just the first couple of bars and attach it here, I’d be pleased to have a look.
Fantastic! Thank you Daniel! You’ll find the score inside a ZIP file attached to this reply.
I’ve also copied something that happened to me yesterday on a different flow. Looks like a bug. The first bar is the result of moving the crash cymbals to an Extra Up-Stem Voice. The second bar is the result of moving the snare drum to an Extra Down-Stem Voice.
It took me a while to pin this down, but I have finally done so. Sorry for the delay.
The reason you’re getting no whole bar rest in the first bar is that you have overridden the voice of the triangle note in the second bar to use one of the “extra” voices via Edit > Percussion. Those “extra” voices are never padded with rests, which explains why there is no rest before that note, which happens to be the first note in the combined five-line presentation of that percussion kit. From looking at your kit, though, you shouldn’t need to use these extra voices anyway: you can select each instrument in your percussion kit and assign a stem direction there. You should try that, and then use Edit > Percussion > Reset Destination Voice to put things back to their default voice assignments. In general it’s better to make those choices in the kit and then only override them in specific cases, rather than to do everything by overriding the voices in the music on a case by case basis.
This is also the cause of the problem with the tuplet in the following bar, though you should find that provided you select the tuplet bracket/number as well as the notes, you can successfully change them into an extra voice if need be.
That’s all right, Daniel. Thank you very much for taking your time to respond.
Yes, I know I can assign the stem direction in the kit but the problem with doing so is that then the crash cymbals, for example, will always appear with the stem up whether or not there’s another instrument present (or am I wrong?.. I’m not at my computer right now) and that’s not the way I like to notate percussion kits in orchestral contexts. All percussion players will read from the same part so it makes sense to use voices but I don’t want the crash cymbals to always be written with the stem up. I want that to happen only if there’s another instrument present. If not, the stems should follow the normal conventions. Perhaps I got it all wrong and this can be achieved after all. I’ll read again the percussion section of the user guide and make some tests in the evening.
Oh, so the trick was to select the tuplet/bracket number too. Got it!
Thanks again!
You can always hit F to flip a stem down.
Yes, I know, and I’ve been using that… but it doesn’t matter anymore because I just discovered I got it all wrong. Dorico does follow the usual stem conventions when just one instrument is present, even if the default stem was set in the opposite direction. Well,… now I know, at least. 
Thank you all for your help!
Antonio
