6.0

597
Polyphonic voicing
Strategies: How many voices do I
need?
Well, it depends…
• If you are scoring for vocals, you simply need one voice for
each voice, so to speak.
• If you use voices for resolving the problem of overlapping
notes (see
“Overlapping notes” on page 594), for example
when scoring for piano, you need two voices each time two
notes overlap. If three notes overlap, you need three voices. In
other words you need to check for the “worst case” (largest
number of overlapping notes at a certain position) and activate
that many. If you do not know how many notes you need when
starting out to prepare a score, do not worry, you can add
more voices later.
• Voices 1 and 2 on the upper staff and 5 and 6 on the lower
are special. These handle “collisions” (notes with small inter
-
vals, accidentals that otherwise would come too close, etc.)
automatically which the other voices do not. Always use these
voices first!
An example: in the situation below, three voices are re-
quired. The lowest note overlaps both the “melody” and
the chords, so it cannot share a voice with the chords. The
chords overlap the melody, so they cannot share a voice
either.
Entering notes into voices
When you add new notes, you need to decide which
voice they go into:
1. Make sure that the extended toolbar is visible.
2. Select the Object Selection tool.
3. If you have a split system, check the voice Insert
buttons.
These are displayed after the text “Insert” on the left side on the extended
toolbar. Only the voices that are activated on the Polyphonic tab are
shown. If the upper staff is active, the voice Insert buttons are numbered 1,
2, etc., otherwise they are numbered 5, 6, etc.
4. If you need to switch the voice icons to the right “clef”,
click somewhere in the system you want to insert notes in.
5. Select one of the voices by clicking on the corre-
sponding button.
Any notes you enter from now on are inserted into that voice.
Voice 3 activated for insertion
6. Insert the notes as usual, see “Adding and editing
notes” on page 576.
7. To switch to another voice, click the corresponding
button.
8. To insert notes into a voice on the other clef, click on
that clef and then select a voice using the buttons.
Symbols and voices
Later in this manual you will learn about symbols that can
be added to the score. Many of these symbols must also
be put into a particular voice, see
“Important! – Symbols,
staves, and voices” on page 621.
Checking which voice a note
belongs to
When you select one single note, the corresponding voice
button on the extended toolbar is selected. This allows you
to quickly find out which voice a certain note is in (after you
have used the Move To Voice function, for example).
• When you step through the notes using the arrow keys,
you only step through the notes in one voice at a time.
This can be used as a quick way to check which notes belong to the
same voice as some other note.