Steinberg Cubase Studio 4 Operation Manual Studio Manual

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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 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 direc-
tion, 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 splitpoint 
can be “floating”. The program can even automatically put a 
bass line on the lower clef for you!
With a split system and with polyphonic voicing.
How voices are created
There are eight voices. The first thing you do is to set them 
up. This includes “telling” the program which voices be-
long 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. See “Adding and editing notes” on page 520.
Overlapping notes
Throughout this chapter you will encounter the term “over-
lapping 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 begin-
ning 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 sec-
ond beat.
A note that starts before another has ended, without and with poly-
phonic 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 will be totally transparent to you as a user. Some-
times you can take advantage of this relationship, as de-
scribed later in this chapter. There are also a few other 
important things to note:
!Each voice is polyphonic. In other words, one voice 
can contain chords. 
						

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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 therefore 
we refer to them as voices 1 to 8.
4.To activate a voice, click in its “On” column, so that a 
tick mark appears.
There are four voices on each staff, for a total of eight. If you activate at 
least one “upper” voice and one “lower” voice, you will get a split (piano) 
staff.
5.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 don’t have good reasons to make changes, leave the settings as they 
are.
6.Click in the “Rests–Show” column to decide for which 
voices you want rests displayed.
A tick mark indicates that rests will be shown for a voice. Often you will 
only want rests to be shown for one voice per staff, see below.
!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 will warn if this happens). In 
other words, don’t change the MIDI channels on the 
Polyphonic tab on the Score Settings–Staff page af-
ter you have put your notes into voices, unless you 
are absolutely sure of what you are doing. Also 
please note that when you open a part that contains 
notes on different MIDI channels, these notes are in 
fact already assigned to voices (since notes are as-
signed 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.
!You can also convert existing tracks into polyphonic 
voices automatically, using the Merge All Staves 
function.
!Do not confuse the voice numbers with the MIDI 
channel setting for each voice.
!Please note the warnings about changing the MIDI 
channel settings in the section “Voices and MIDI 
channels” on page 537. Also note that if two voices 
are set to the same MIDI channel, the lower will be 
treated as if it were turned off. 
						

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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, the rest will get a vertical position 
based on the pitch of the notes.
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 547.
10.If you want the notes in a voice to be smaller than reg-
ular notes, put a tick mark in the Cue column for the voice.
11.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. See 
“Automatically – the Explode function” on page 541.
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. Cor-
rect these notes?”.
This warning appears when the staff contains notes with 
MIDI channel settings which do not match any of the ac-
tive voices.
If you click the “Correct” button, these notes will be moved 
to active voices. If you click “Ignore”, nothing will be 
changed, and some notes will be 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. In-
stead 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 doesn’t 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 set-
tings as voices 1 and 2. This is the recommended way to 
write piano music.
!There is a special stem feature for voice 1: If you set 
this to Auto, the stem direction will depend on the 
pitch of the note as usual – except if there are voice 
2 notes in the bar, because then the voice 1 stems 
will automatically be set to Up! 
						

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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” (largest number of overlapping notes at a 
certain position) and activate that many. If you don’t know how 
many notes you need when starting out to prepare a score, 
don’t 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 don’t. 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 can’t share a voice with the chords. The chords overlap 
the melody, so they can’t 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 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.
Here three voices are available on the upper staff.
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 will be inserted into that voice.
Voice 3 activated for insertion.
6.Insert the notes as usual, see “Adding and editing no-
tes” on page 520.
7.If you want to switch to another voice, click the corre-
sponding button.
8.If you want 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 567.
Checking which voice a note 
belongs to
When you select one (and only one) note, the correspond-
ing 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 ex-
ample).
When you step through the notes using the arrow keys, 
you will 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. 
						

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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 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 cate-
gory of the Key Commands dialog on the File menu.
Automatically – the Explode function
The Explode function distributes notes, either into new 
tracks (see “The Explode function” on page 515) or into 
polyphonic voices:
1.Pull down the Scores menu and select “Explode…” 
from the Functions submenu.
The Explode dialog, set to create polyphonic voices.
2.Make sure “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:
4.Click OK.
The notes are distributed to different voices.
Option Description
Split Note Use this to move all notes below a certain pitch to another 
voice.
Lines  To  Tracks Use this when you want all musical “lines” to be put in one 
voice each. The notes with the highest pitch will go to the 
first voice, the notes with the second highest pitch will go 
to the second, and so on.
Bass To Lowest 
VoiceWhen this is activated, the lowest notes will always end 
up in the lowest voice. 
						

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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 
up the Logical Editor so that the notes that meet the criteria 
get their MIDI channel changed to that of their voice.
 When you enter notes using step input you can change the 
MIDI channel on your input device and directly enter notes into 
separate voices.
 You can play back each voice on a different MIDI channel, 
simply by setting the track to Any. This can be used as a con-
venient way of “proof-hearing” each voice separately.
 You can use the Input Transformer to assign a certain key 
range to a MIDI channel, and thereby automatically put notes 
into voices when recording.
 For brass and vocals, you might record each voice on its own 
track, and use the “Merge All Staves” function to automatically 
copy each recording to a separate voice on a new track (see 
“Automatic polyphonic voicing – Merge All Staves” on page 
544).
 When you have assigned parts to voices, you can use the Ex-
tract Voices function to create one track out of each voice (see 
“Converting voices to tracks – Extract Voices” on page 545).
Handling rests
With polyphonic voices you often get more rest symbols 
than desired.
If a voice doesn’t need any rests at all, you can deacti-
vate rests for each voice individually 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 don’t “collide” in the score, by adjusting their vertical 
position.To avoid having several rests displayed in empty bars, 
you can activate the Rests–Reduce option for all voices 
(that have rests) except one. This option causes the pro-
gram to hide rests in empty bars.
You can use the Hide feature (see “Hiding/showing ob-
jects” on page 609) to totally remove individual superflu-
ous rests from the score.
You can use the Object Selection tool to manually move 
rests up/down or sideways to adjust the “picture”.
If needed you can add “rest symbols” (rests that don’t 
affect the playback data in any way) by using the symbols.
Voices and display quantize
When you insert display quantize changes (see “Inserting 
display quantize changes” on page 514), you can either 
apply the settings to all voices (by [Alt]/[Option]-clicking 
with the tool) or to the current voice only.
Making display quantize settings affect one voice only (by 
clicking without pressing [Alt]/[Option]) allows you to do 
two things:
Make each voice have its own display quantize settings 
by inserting a display quantize event for each voice, at the 
beginning of the staff. This will then be valid for the entire 
staff, until another display quantize event is inserted.
Insert display quantize “exceptions” anywhere in the 
score, independently for each voice. Proceed as follows:
1.Make sure the option “Display Quantize tool affects all 
Voices” is deactivated.
2.Select the voice for which you wish to insert a display 
quantize event.
This is done by clicking at the corresponding voice button on the ex-
tended toolbar as described above, or by selecting a note that belongs 
to this voice.
!If “Display Quantize tool affects all Voices” is acti-
vated on the “Notation Style” subpage (Miscellaneous 
category) of the Score Settings–Project page, the 
display quantize settings will always affect all voices 
(even if you don’t press [Alt]/[Option] and click). 
						

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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-
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 voice 1 and 2 only, and make settings for 
them as in the picture below.
4.Click Apply.
The staff is in Polyphonic staff mode, but all notes are still in the same 
voice.
5.Pull down the Scores menu and select “Explode” from 
the Functions submenu.
6.In the dialog that appears, select the “To Polyphonic 
Voices” option and activate “Lines To Tracks”.
Leave the other options off.
7.Click OK.
The notes have now been split in two “lines”, each in a separate voice. 
However, from the middle of the bar, notes that are in voice 1 should be 
in voice 2 and vice versa. 
						

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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 some work to do on the 
notes graphical positions (see “Graphic moving of notes” 
on page 557) and the display of stems and beams for 
some of the notes (see “Manual adjustment of beams” on 
page 555). When you have made those adjustments, the 
score may look like this:
After graphical adjustments.
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 voices activated, and the four original tracks will be assigned 
to one voice each (voices 1, 2, 5 and 6 will be used).
Furthermore, all non-linked symbols that belong to the staff that will be-
come the first polyphonic voice in the merged staff will be copied. They 
will have the same positions as the original symbols. 
!When you later play back the music, you need to mute 
the four original tracks, or you will get double notes.  
						

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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 the music from one polyphonic voice. If 
there were non-linked symbols in the original track, each new track will 
get a copy of these symbols. 
!When you later play back the music, you need to 
mute the original track (the one with polyphonic 
voices), or you will get double notes.