Steinberg Cubase 5 Operation Manual

6
Polyphonic voicing 

532
Polyphonic voicing
About this chapter
In this chapter you will learn:
 How to decide when to use polyphonic voicing.
 How to set up voices.
 How to automatically convert your score to polyphonic voicing.
 How to enter and move notes into voices.
Background: Polyphonic voicing
Polyphonic voicing allows you to resolve a number of situ-
ations impossible to score properly otherwise:
Notes starting at the same position, but with different 
lengths. Without polyphonic voicing you get unnecessary 
amounts...

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Polyphonic voicing
Voices and MIDI channels
Internally the program organizes the notes into voices by 
changing their MIDI channel values. Normally you set it up 
so that notes with MIDI channel 3 belong to voice 3 etc. 
Most of the time the link between MIDI channels and voices 
will be totally transparent to you as a user. Sometimes you 
can take advantage of this relationship, as described later 
in this chapter. 
There are also a few important things to note:
ÖWhen you make a note part of a...

534
Polyphonic voicing
9.Decide on a stem direction for each voice, by select-
ing from the pop-up in the Stems column.
If you select Auto, the program will make decisions about which stems go 
in which direction (just as when not using polyphonic voices). You can al-
ways force stem direction for individual notes by using the Flip Stem 
function, see “Flipping the stem of one or several notes” on page 541.
10.If you want the notes in a voice to be smaller than regu-
lar notes, put a checkmark in the Cue...

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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.
 Often you will use voices for resolving the problem of overlap-
ping notes (see “Overlapping notes” on page 532), for exam-
ple when scoring for piano. In this case, you will need two 
voices each time two notes overlap. If three notes overlap, you 
will need three voices. In other words you will need to check 
for the “worst case”...

536
Polyphonic voicing
Moving notes between voices
Manually
To manually move notes to another voice, proceed as fol-
lows:
1.Select the note(s) you want to move to a particular 
voice.
2.Right-click on one of the notes and select “Move to 
Voice” from the context menu.
Move to Voice and the submenu it invokes.
3.On the submenu, select the voice to which you want 
to move the notes.
Only the activated voices are available on the menu.
You can also press [Ctrl]/[Command] and click a voice 
Insert button on...

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Polyphonic voicing
Handling rests
With polyphonic voices, you often get more rest symbols 
than desired.
If a voice does not need any rests at all, you can deacti-
vate rests separately for this voice on the Polyphonic tab 
on the Score Settings–Staff page.
If you only need rests from one voice on a staff, activate 
Rests–Center for that voice (this is done in the same dia-
log). If two or more voices have rests, deactivate Rests–
Center. The program then automatically makes sure the 
rests do not...

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Polyphonic voicing
Creating crossed voicings
Often, for example in vocal scoring, you will have crossed 
voicings on one system. You can of course move notes 
manually into voices to get the stem direction and other 
note properties right, but there is a quicker way. Let’s ex-
plain how to do this by example. Without using polyphonic 
voicing, you have entered this:
1.Open the Score Settings–Staff page and select the 
Polyphonic tab.
2.From the Staff Mode pop-up menu, select Polyphonic.
3.Activate...

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Polyphonic voicing
Automatic polyphonic voicing – 
Merge All Staves
If you have already created some tracks which look and 
play back as they should, and you want to combine these 
into one track with polyphonic voices, there is a special 
function on the Scores menu for this:
1.Open the tracks (up to four) in the Score Editor.
2.Pull down the Scores menu and select “Merge All 
Staves” from the Functions submenu.
Now a new track is created and shown in the score. The track will have 
polyphonic...

7
Additional note and rest formatting