Setting up the voices

To set up your score for polyphonic voicing, proceed as follows:

Procedure

  1. Make sure that the desired staff is active.
  2. Open the Score Settings dialog and select the Staff page.
  3. Select the Polyphonic tab.
  4. Open the Staff Mode pop-up menu and select Polyphonic.

    This makes the voice list in the lower part of the dialog available. It consists of eight rows, one for each voice. They are numbered and therefore we refer to them as voices 1 to 8.

    Important

    Do not confuse the voice numbers with the MIDI channel setting for each voice.

  5. To activate a voice, click in its “On” column, so that a checkmark appears.

    There are four voices on each staff, for a total of eight. If you activate one “upper” voice and one “lower” voice, you get a split (piano) staff.

  6. If you have particular reasons to use specific MIDI channels, change the “Chan” settings for the voices.

    The program automatically sets each voice to a different MIDI channel. If you do not have good reasons to make changes, leave the settings as they are.

    Important

    If two voices are set to the same MIDI channel, the lower voice is treated as if it were turned off.

  7. Click in the “Rests–Show” column to decide for which voices you want rests displayed.

    A checkmark indicates that rests are shown for a voice. Often you only want rests to be shown for one voice per staff, see below.

  8. If you have activated “Rests–Show” for a voice, but do not want rests to be shown in empty bars, click in the “Rests–Reduce” column for that voice.

    This is especially useful for cue voices.

  9. Click in the “Rests–Center” column to determine at which vertical positions rests are shown (for voices with “Rests–Show” activated).

    If this option is activated for a voice, the rest is put in the vertical center of the staff, when it is not, the rest gets a vertical position based on the pitch of the notes.

  10. Decide on a stem direction for each voice, by selecting from the pop-up menu in the Stems column.

    If you select Auto, the program makes decisions about which stems go in which direction (just as when not using polyphonic voices). You can always force stem direction for individual notes by using the Flip Stem function.

    Important

    There is a special stem feature for voice 1: If you set this to Auto, the stem direction depends on the pitch of the note as usual – except if there are voice 2 notes in the bar, because then the voice 1 stems are automatically set to Up!

  11. If you want the notes in a voice to be smaller than regular notes, put a checkmark in the Cue column for the voice.
  12. Click Apply.

    The staff is changed to polyphonic voicing, and the program distributes the existing notes into voices according to their MIDI channel values.

    At this point you may want to use the Explode function to automatically move notes into the proper voices.