Steinberg Cubase Studio 4 Operation Manual Studio Manual

6
Polyphonic voicing 

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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
Setting up the voices
This text describes the Polyphonic tab of the Score Set-
tings–Staff page in general. Below you will find more de-
tailed information on how to select from the multitude of 
options.
1.Open the Score Settings–Staff page for the staff.
2.Select the Polyphonic tab.3.Pull down the Staff Mode pop-up and select Poly-
phonic.
This makes the voice list in the lower part of the dialog available. It con-
sists of eight rows, one for each voice. They are numbered and...

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Polyphonic voicing
7.If you have activated “Rests–Show” for a voice, but 
don’t want rests to be shown in empty bars, click in the 
“Rests–Reduce” column for that voice.
This is especially useful for cue voices, see “Cue notes” on page 558.
8.Click in the “Rests–Center” column to determine at 
which vertical positions rests should be shown (for voices 
with “Rests–Show” activated).
When this option is activated for a voice, the rest will be put in the verti-
cal center of the staff, when it is not,...

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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 537), 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”...

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Polyphonic voicing
Moving notes between voices
Manually
To manually move notes to a particular voice, proceed as 
follows:
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 that appears.
Move to Voice and the submenu it invokes.
3.On the submenu, select the voice to which you want 
to move the notes.
Voices not activated are not shown.
Alternatively, you can press [Ctrl]/[Command] and click 
a voice Insert...

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Polyphonic voicing
Alternative ways of handling voices
Below we suggest further “advanced” ways of putting 
notes into voices. This is based on the relation between 
voices and MIDI channels, so please make sure you un-
derstand how this connection works.
 You can use the Logical Editor (see the chapter “The Logical 
Editor, Transformer and Input Transformer” on page 370) to 
put notes into voices, based on other more complex criteria, 
like for example their pitch and length. This is done by setting...

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Polyphonic voicing
3.Select the Display Quantize tool.
4.Click at the position you want to insert the event.
The Display Quantize dialog appears.
5.Fill out the dialog as described in the section “Display 
quantize” on page 510. 
6.Click Apply.
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’s a quicker way. Let’s ex-...

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Polyphonic voicing
8.Select the two notes that should be moved from voice 
1 to voice 2.
Two notes in voice 1 selected.
9.Move the notes to voice 2.
The quickest way to do this is to press [Ctrl]/[Command] and click the 
voice Insert [2] button on the extended toolbar.
Two notes moved to the right voice.
10.Select the two notes that should be moved to voice 1 
and move them too.
All notes in the right voices.
The voicing is now correct, as you can tell from the stem 
directions. However, theres still...

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Polyphonic voicing
Converting voices to tracks – 
Extract Voices
This function does the opposite of “Merge All Staves” – it 
extracts polyphonic voices from an existing track and cre-
ates new tracks, one for each voice. Proceed as follows:
1.Open a track containing 2 to 8 polyphonic voices in the 
Score Editor.
2.Pull down the Scores menu and select “Extract 
Voices” from the Functions submenu.
A number of new tracks is created and added to the display of the Score 
Editor. Each track will contain...