Steinberg Cubase 8 Manual
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Staff settings The Options tab 1161 No Beams Activate this when you do not want any beaming at all on the staff (for example for vocal scoring). Beam Subgroups Use this when you want sixteenth notes displayed under a beam to be divided into groups of four notes. Without and with Beam Subgroups. 16th Subgroups Use this when you want even smaller subgroups of sixteenth notes. This setting has no effect if Beam Subgroups is deactivated. As above, but with 16th Subgroups activated. RELATED LINKS Beam appearance and slant settings on page 1194 Turning beaming on/off on page 1188 Handling beam groups on page 1194 System Sizes This section allows you to set the number of system lines and to control spacing between the lines: System Lines The number of lines in a system. For regular scoring, this should be set to 5. Add Space Allows you to increase or decrease the space between the lines in a system. Size Allows you to set a size for the systems, as a percentage (with 100 % being the default value). In effect, this setting scales the score vertically. Score Drum Map When scoring for drums, you can assign a unique note head to each pitch. There is even the possibility to set up different note heads for different note values! RELATED LINKS Scoring for drums on page 1303
Staff settings The Polyphonic tab 1162 Fixed Stems Activate this if you want all note stems to end at the same vertical position. This feature is perhaps most often used when scoring for drums. A drum pattern with Fixed Stem length activated The Up and Down parameters determine which position (relative to the top of the staff) is used for up and down stems, respectively. The graphical display helps you get your settings right. RELATED LINKS Setting up a staff for drum scoring on page 1307 Note Limits Use the Low and High fields to specify a note range. In the active staff, any notes outside this range are displayed in a different color. When writing a score for a specific instrument, this makes it easy to find notes that are outside of this instrument’s note range. NOTE If the “Hide Notes beyond limits” option is activated in the Preferences dialog (Scores–Editing page), any notes outside the Note Limits range are hidden. The Polyphonic tab This is where you activate and set up split (piano) systems or polyphonic voices (several independent score lines in the same staves). RELATED LINKS Polyphonic voicing on page 1163 The Tablature tab This tab contains settings for creating tablature scores. RELATED LINKS Creating tablature on page 1309
1163 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 situations impossible to score properly otherwise: • Notes starting at the same position, but with different lengths. Without polyphonic voicing you get unnecessary amounts of ties. Without and with polyphonic voicing • Vocal scoring and similar. Without polyphonic voicing, all notes starting at the same position are considered parts of a chord. With polyphonic voicing you can give each voice a stem direction, you can have individual rest handling for each voice, etc. Without and with polyphonic voicing • Complicated piano systems. Without polyphonic voicing, you have to resort to a fixed split note setting to decide which notes go on which clef. With polyphonic voicing, the split point can be “floating”. The program can even automatically put a bass line on the lower clef for you.
Polyphonic voicing Background: Polyphonic voicing 1164 With a split system and with polyphonic voicing How voices are created Cubase allows for up to eight voices. The first thing you do is to set them up. This includes “telling” the program which voices belong to the upper clef and which belong to the lower, how you want rests displayed for each voice, etc. The second thing you do is to move or enter notes into the voices. If you have a recording done already, the program can do much of this work for you, automatically. You might then want to fine-tune by moving one or more notes into another voice, or you might want to add notes to a certain voice. IMPORTANTIMPORTANTIMPORTANTIMPORTANT Each voice is polyphonic. In other words, one voice can contain chords. RELATED LINKS Adding and editing notes on page 1132 Overlapping notes Throughout this chapter you encounter the term “overlapping notes”. Two notes are considered overlapping when they are on the same staff and: • They start at the same position, but have different note values (for example whole note and a quarter note both at the beginning of a bar), or… Notes starting at the same position, without and with polyphonic voices. • One note starts before another has ended. For example a half note at the beginning of a bar and an eighth note at the second beat. A note that starts before another has ended, without and with polyphonic voices. 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 is totally transparent to you as a user. Sometimes you can take advantage of this relationship, as described later in this chapter.
Polyphonic voicing Setting up the voices 1165 There are also a few important things to note: NOTE When you make a note part of a voice, you are in fact changing its MIDI channel value. However, when you change the voice’s MIDI channel values in the setup dialog, this does not affect the notes’ MIDI channel setting. This can lead to serious confusion, since the relationship between the notes and the voices is affected. It might even make notes disappear (the program warns if this happens). In other words, do not change the MIDI channels on the Polyphonic tab of the Staff page in the Score Settings dialog after you have put your notes into voices, unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing. NOTE When you open a part that contains notes on different MIDI channels, these notes are in fact already assigned to voices (since notes are assigned to voices using their MIDI channel setting). While this fact can be put to good use, it can also create confusion, and even disappearing notes, as described above. 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.
Polyphonic voicing Setting up the voices 1166 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). When 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. RELATED LINKS Cue notes on page 1199 Flipping the stem of one or several notes on page 1178 Automatically – the Explode function on page 1170
Polyphonic voicing Setting up the voices 1167 If the “Some Notes Do Not Belong To Voices…” dialog appears When you click Apply, a warning may appear saying “Some notes do not belong to any voice and may be hidden. Correct these notes?”. This warning appears when the staff contains notes with MIDI channel settings which do not match any of the active voices. If you click the “Correct” button, these notes are moved to active voices. If you click “Ignore”, nothing is changed, and some notes are hidden. However, they are not lost, they appear in all other editors and can be made to appear again in the Score Editor if you change the channel settings for the notes or voices, activate more voices, etc. About the polyphonic presets The Presets pop-up menu on the Polyphonic tab (below the list of voices) contains three very useful setups. Instead of making settings by hand, you can select one of the presets, saving some time. The presets are: Variable Split This sets up the dialog for two voices, one on each staff, each with auto stem direction. This is a good starting point for a piano staff when the fixed split option does not suffice. Optimize Two Voices In this preset, only voices 1 and 2 are activated, and set up like this: This way the first voice behaves as in single staff mode, but if there are notes in the second voice, the stems of the first one are set to Up. Optimize Four Voices This is like “Optimize Two Voices”, but with two staves. Voices 5 and 6 are activated as well, with the same settings as voices 1 and 2. This is the recommended way to write piano music.
Polyphonic voicing Strategies: How many voices do I need? 1168 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, 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 intervals, 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 required. 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. RELATED LINKS Overlapping notes on page 1164 Entering notes into voices When you add new notes, you need to decide which voice they go into: PROCEDURE 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 corresponding button. Any notes you enter from now on are inserted into that voice.
Polyphonic voicing Checking which voice a note belongs to 1169 Voice 3 activated for insertion 6. Insert the notes as usual. 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. RELATED LINKS Adding and editing notes on page 1132 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. RELATED LINKS Important! – Symbols, staves, and voices on page 1212 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. Moving notes between voices Manually To manually move notes to another voice, proceed as follows: PROCEDURE 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.
Polyphonic voicing Moving notes between voices 1170 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 the extended toolbar to move the selected notes to the corresponding voice. You can also assign key commands for this in the Score Functions category of the Key Commands dialog on the File menu. Automatically – the Explode function The Explode function distributes notes, either onto new tracks or into polyphonic voices: PROCEDURE 1. Open the Scores menu and select “Explode” from the Functions submenu. The Explode dialog, set to create polyphonic voices. 2. Make sure that “To Polyphonic Voices” is selected at the top of the dialog. 3. Use the options in the lower half of the dialog to set up the criteria for the split. Choose from the following options: