Steinberg Nuendo Expansion Kit User Manual

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Entering and editing notes
Lengthening a note by gluing two notes together
You can create unusual note length values by gluing notes 
of the same pitch together.
1.Insert the notes you want to glue together (if they don’t 
already exist).
2.Select the Glue tool from the toolbar or Quick menu.
The Glue tool on the Quick menu.
3.Click on the first note.
This note will now be tied to the first following note with the same pitch.
4.If you want to glue more notes, click again.
By gluing together a quarter note, an eighth note and a sixteenth note…
…you get a double dotted quarter note.
Changing the display length
If you want to change the displayed length of notes with-
out affecting how they play back, the first thing to try is to 
adjust display quantize, either for the whole staff or for a 
separate section, using the Display Quantize tool (see 
“Inserting display quantize changes” on page 78). 
But you can also make display length adjustments to indi-
vidual notes in the Set Note Info dialog:
1.Double-click on the note.
The Set Note Info dialog opens.
2.Locate the “Displ. Length” setting.
By default, this is set to “Auto”, i.e. the note will be displayed according 
to its actual length (and the display quantize settings).
3.Double-click in the value field and enter a new length 
value (displayed in bars, beats, sixteenth notes and ticks).
To set the display length to “Auto” again, scroll the value down to zero.
4.Click Apply and close the dialog.
The note will now be displayed according to its display length setting. 
However, the display quantize settings still apply!
Splitting a note in two
If you have two notes strung together by a tie, and click on 
the “tied” note head with the Split tool, the note will be di-
vided into two, with the respective length of the “main” 
and the tied note.
Before and after splitting a tied note.
Working with the Display Quantize 
tool
There are instances when you will want different staff set-
tings for different sections of the track. The settings on the 
Score Settings–Staff page are valid for the entire track, 
but by using the Display Quantize tool, you are able to in-
sert changes and exceptions wherever you like. This is de-
scribed in detail in the section “Inserting display quantize 
changes” on page 78.
!Make sure you have display quantize values for notes 
and rests that allow you to display notes of the cre-
ated note value. 
						

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Entering and editing notes
Split (piano) staves
Setting up the split staff
1.Make a staff active.
2.Open the Score Settings–Staff page for the staff and 
select the Polyphonic tab.
3.From the Staff Mode pop-up, select Split.
4.Set the Splitpoint value to a suitable note.
All notes below this note value will be put on the lower clef, all above will 
be put on the upper clef.
Split mode selected.
If the default piano clef settings for the upper and lower 
staff are not what you want, you can adjust these settings 
now (or you can make key and clef adjustments directly in 
the score, see “Setting key, clef and time signature” on 
page 65).
5.Make whatever additional staff settings you need.
These will apply to both the upper and lower staves of the split system.
6.Click Apply.
Before and after setting a split at C3.
Adding notes
This is done just as on a single system, see “Adding and 
editing notes” on page 84. Please note the following:
 When you enter a note, use the mouse position box (on the 
toolbar) to determine the pitch. Whether it ends up on the up-
per or lower staff has nothing to do with where you aim with 
the mouse. The Splitpoint setting always decides if a note 
goes on the upper or lower clef. If you change the splitpoint, 
this will affect existing notes, see below.
 Sometimes a fixed splitpoint isn’t good enough. You might 
want to put two notes with the same pitch on different staves 
in different parts of the score. To achieve this you need to use 
polyphonic voicing, see “Polyphonic voicing” on page 95.
Changing the splitpoint
1.Open the Score Settings–Staff page for the system 
you are working on.
2.Select the Polyphonic tab.
3.Change the Splitpoint value.
4.Click Apply.
Now, some notes that were previously on the lower staff 
will be on the upper, or vice versa.
Strategies: Multiple staves
As described above, when you have parts on several 
tracks selected in the Project window, these will be put on 
one staff each, when you open the Score Editor. This al-
lows you to work on several staves in parallel.
Working with several staves is not much different from 
working with one. Below follow some guidelines that apply 
specifically to working with multiple staves.
Score settings–Staff page
 The settings on the Score Settings–Staff page are local to 
each staff. You can have the Score Settings dialog open and 
select each staff in turn to make settings – just remember to 
click Apply before selecting another staff, otherwise your 
changes will be lost. 
						

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Entering and editing notes
 If several staves share settings, you will save some time by us-
ing staff presets. Set up the staff settings for the first staff, and 
save them as a preset. This preset can then be applied to any 
of the other staves, one at a time. See “Working with staff pre-
sets” on page 106 for details.
Selecting notes
 You can select notes from one or several staves at the same 
time, using any of the selection methods, see “Selecting notes” 
on page 86.
Adding notes
 You can add notes to any staff by clicking on it with the Insert 
Note tool. The active staff rectangle will move to the staff 
where you input the note.
 If you need to enter a note with a very high or low pitch, which 
makes it wind up on the wrong staff when you click, first enter 
a note with the wrong pitch, and then edit its pitch as de-
scribed in the section “Editing pitches of individual notes” on 
page 89.
Inserting and editing clefs, keys or 
time signatures
It is possible to insert a change of key, clef, or time signa-
ture anywhere in the score:
Inserting a symbol on one staff
1.Open the “Clefs etc.” tab in the Inspector.
This contains clef, key and time signature symbols.
The “Clefs etc.” tab in the Inspector.
2.Select the symbol you wish to insert.
When you move the mouse over the score display, the pointer takes on 
the form of a pencil (see also “About the Pencil tool” on page 132).
3.Move the mouse over the staff where you want to in-
sert a new symbol.
Use the mouse position box to find the exact location. The vertical posi-
tion is of no relevance as long as you click somewhere in the staff. Time 
signature changes can only be inserted at the beginning of a bar.
4.Click the mouse button to insert the symbol.
Inserting a symbol on all staves
If you hold down [Alt]/[Option] when you insert a symbol 
with the Pencil tool, it will be inserted at this position on all 
staves currently being edited in the Score Editor. Note:
ÖTime signature changes are always inserted on all 
tracks in the score.
Or rather, they are inserted on the tempo track, which affects all tracks.
ÖFor key changes, display transpose is taken into 
account.
This allows you to set all staves to a new key and the staves set to dis-
play transpose will still show the correct key after the key change.
ÖIf some of the staves are bracketed (straight brackets 
only, as set up on the Score Settings–Layout page, see 
“Adding brackets and braces” on page 181), inserting a 
symbol for one of these staves will insert it for all other 
staves within the bracket.
Staves outside the bracket will not be affected.
Editing keys, clefs and time signatures
If you double-click on a symbol, a dialog appears allowing 
you to change the settings for it.
If you hold down [Alt]/[Option] when double-clicking, all 
symbols at the same position are changed accordingly. 
With key signatures, the display transpose value is taken 
into account as described above.
!Inserting a symbol at position 1.1.1.0 is the same as 
changing the staff settings which are stored in the 
track. Inserting anywhere else adds the change to 
the part. 
						

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Entering and editing notes
On the Score Settings–Project page (Notation sub-
page), you will find several options for how key, clef and 
time signature changes should be displayed.
You can also adjust the automatic spacing between these symbols in the 
Spacings subpage. See the dialog help for details.
Moving clefs
Clefs inserted into the score have an effect on how notes 
are displayed. If you for example insert a bass clef in the 
middle of a treble staff, the staff switches to show bass 
pitches. Therefore it is very important where you insert the 
clef.
If you want to move the clef graphically, without disturbing 
the relation between the clef and the notes, proceed as 
follows:
1.Select the Layout tool.
This is available in Page Mode only.
2.Click and move the clef just as with the normal Object 
Selection tool.
Now the clef is moved, but the score is still interpreted as if it remained in 
its original position.
ÖWhen you inserted a clef change in the score, you can 
decide whether this should have the same size as the first 
(default) clef symbol or whether it should be displayed 
with a smaller symbol. Simply right-click the symbol and 
activate or deactivate “Display Clef Changes as small 
Symbols”, respectively.
ÖWhen “Warnings for new Clefs at Line Breaks” is ac-
tivated on the Clef context menu and you inserted a clef 
change at a line break in the score, the Clef change sym-
bol will be inserted in the last bar before the staff break. 
When this is deactivated, the symbol will be inserted in 
the first bar of the next staff line.
Deleting notes
Notes can be deleted in two ways:
Using the Erase tool
1.Select the Erase tool from the toolbar or Quick menu.
The Erase tool on the Quick menu.
2.Click on the note(s) you want to erase, one at a time or 
drag over them with the mouse button pressed to enclose 
them in a selection rectangle, and click on one of the notes.
Using delete menu item or the keyboard
1.Select the notes you want to delete.
2.Select Delete from the Edit menu, or press [Delete] or 
[Backspace] on the computer keyboard. 
						

							9
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 84.
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 96. 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 123.
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 111.
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 100.
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 96), 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 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 84.
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 132.
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 79) 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.