I’m trying to figure out how to work with single (or selected) voices in Dorico but not making much progress with the manual. Here are some things I’d like to do:
Hide all voices expect one as if they don’t exist and do all functions with the single remaining voice without impacting the other voices (like “show active layer” in Finale but I assume Dorico does this differently).
Copy only one voice to one voice of choice in a target location (couldn’t get “paste into voice” to work - It would paste only one voice even though I selected two).
Delete only one voice.
When I say “only one” voice I really mean any combination of voices that I want to work with. Anyway you get the picture! I trying to figure out how to work with voices independently and not impact the voices I want to exclude. Thanks!
Hi @Steve_225 , it would be interesting to see an example (the best would be a Dorico file with an excerpt of what you have and what you want to obtain) to give you precise instructions/tips, on how to achieve what you need.
As you are a new user I take the liberty to remind you, generally, this post (in particular nr. 4):
Thanks! My question is rather general, but I created an example attached. One thing I want to do is to hide all but one voice (e.g. the voice named “Down Stem Voice 1”). Now, everything I do such as copy, paste, modify notes, whatever would apply only to the displayed voice and never affect the hidden voices. How would you accomplish that? I.e. I want to work on the flow as if the other voices never existed. voices testing.dorico (500.5 KB)
To my knowledge this is not possible - I believe you cannot “hide” voices in this way ( by which you seen to mean temporarily not showing them to avoid editing them or copying them by mistake).
The closest thing to this would be the instrument filters in galley view, but that just filters to specific instruments and not to specific voices within instruments.
I imagine you’re trying to look for an equivalent operation to Finale’s “Hide Layers” which doesn’t exist to my knowledge.
You can of course hide a notehead and/or a stem and/or accidentals, but even if you hide all three components of a note, this doesn’t prevent you from selecting, modifying, deleting, or copying the note, so I don’t think this is what you are referring to.
My question would be - and this is just out of curiosity - in what real-world situations do you find yourself needing such a feature?
Don’t forget about turning on voice colors, which may help you, in this case. I don’t use them, since the caret always tells you what’s going on (and if you have more than one voice, you also have stem direction as an aide) but they are helpful every so often.
You’d think Dorico would have thought of this, but perhaps I won’t miss it after I learn all of the various techniques. Yes, in Finale you can hide layers and/or show only the active layer. In the real-world I use it very, very frequently whenever I create or modify a score. I suppose copy, pasting, and deleting a single voice would be a common use. And sometimes I’m working on a voice and just don’t want to see the other voices. It’s not much, but at least I got the filter that @Janus provided.
Can I just ask, why? For example, are you simply accustomed to working with multiple voices in a single staff because Finale lacked the ability (easily) to do divisi or to condense?
As Janus says, in many cases you don’t have to use voices for as many things that you use them for in Finale. They don’t really apply to percussion kits for instance, so that is a different situation from Finale. You also wouldn’t automatically use them for string divisi, for instance, because you’ve got the divisi features for that. You also wouldn’t use them to do a condensed score, because you’ve got the condensing for that. So really, because of all these other features, you end up needing to use voices much less frequently in Dorico than in other software programs. In most cases you would just use voices in Dorico for writing things like Bach fugues or other piano music (or music for some other polyphonic instrument) where you had multiple independent lines.
In the case of drum parts, yes. But otherwise I often work with individual voices with piano parts. Yes, I would like to have that feature, but in this post I was only asking if/how you would do it. It looks like that feature is not available, but I probably don’t need it with Dorico in any case.
