Steinberg Cubase SX/SL 3 Score Layout And Printing Manual

							6
Polyphonic voicing 
						

							CUBASE SX6 – 102 Polyphonic voicing
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 im-
possible to score properly otherwise:
• Notes starting at the same position, but with different lengths. Without poly-
phonic 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 poly-
phonic voicing the split point can be “floating”. The program can even auto-
matically put a bass line on the lower clef for you!
With a split system and with polyphonic voicing. 
						

							CUBASE SXPolyphonic voicing 6 – 103
How voices are created
There are eight voices. The first thing you do is to set them up. This in-
cludes “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 mov-
ing one or more notes into another voice, or you might want to add 
notes to a certain voice.
❐Each voice is polyphonic. In other words, one voice can contain chords.
Overlapping notes
Throughout this chapter you will 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 be-
ginning of a bar and an eighth note at the second beat.
A note that starts before another has ended, without and with polyphonic voices. 
						

							CUBASE SX6 – 104 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 be-
tween MIDI channels and voices will be totally transparent to you as a 
user. Sometimes you can take advantage of this relationship, as de-
scribed later in this chapter. There are also a few other important 
things to 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 will 
warn if this happens). In other words, don’t change the MIDI channels in 
the Staff Settings dialog on the Polyphonic tab after 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 differ-
ent MIDI channels, these notes are de facto 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. 
						

							CUBASE SXPolyphonic voicing 6 – 105
Setting up the voices
This text describes the Polyphonic tab of the Staff Settings dialog in 
general. Below you will find more detailed explanations on how to se-
lect from the multitude of options.
❐You can also convert existing tracks into polyphonic voices automati-
cally, using the Merge All Staves function.
1.Open the Staff Settings dialog for the staff.
2.Select the Polyphonic tab.
3.Pull down the Staff Mode pop-up and select Polyphonic.
This makes the voice list in the lower part of the dialog available. It consists of eight 
rows with one voice in each. They are numbered and therefore we refer to them as 
voices 1 to 8.
❐Do not confuse the voice numbers with the MIDI channel setting for each 
voice. 
						

							CUBASE SX6 – 106 Polyphonic voicing
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.
❐Please note the warnings about changing the MIDI channel settings on 
page 104. Also note that if two voices are set to the same MIDI channel, 
the lower will be treated as if it were turned off.
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.
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 page 148.
8.Click in the “Rests–Center” column to determine at which vertical posi-
tions 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 vertical 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 selecting 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). Regardless of which option you 
show, you can always force stem direction for individual notes by using the Flip Stem 
function, see page 123.
❐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!
10.If you want the notes in a voice to be smaller than regular notes, put a 
tick mark in the Cue column for the voice. 
						

							CUBASE SXPolyphonic voicing 6 – 107
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 automati-
cally move notes into the proper voices. See page 112.
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 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 edi-
tors 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. 
						

							CUBASE SX6 – 108 Polyphonic voicing
About the polyphonic presets
The Presets pop-up menu on the Polyphonic tab (above 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 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 settings as voices 1 and 2. This 
is the recommended way to write piano music. 
						

							CUBASE SXPolyphonic voicing 6 – 109
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 overlapping notes (see 
page 103), for example 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 intervals, accidentals that otherwise 
would come too close, etc.) automatically which the other voices don’t. Al-
ways 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. 
						

							CUBASE SX6 – 110 Polyphonic voicing
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 to the extended toolbar. Only 
the voices that are activated on the Polyphonic tab are shown. If the upper staff is ac-
tive, the voice Insert buttons are numbered 1, 2, etc., otherwise they are numbered 5, 6, 
etc.
The voice Insert buttons – here three voices are activated on the upper staff.
4.If you need to switch the voice icons to the right “clef”, click some-
where 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 will now be inserted into that voice.
Voice 3 activated for insertion.
6.Insert the notes as usual.
7.If you want to switch to another voice, click the corresponding 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 page 168.