Steinberg Cubase 6 Manual
Have a look at the manual Steinberg Cubase 6 Manual online for free. It’s possible to download the document as PDF or print. UserManuals.tech offer 523 Steinberg manuals and user’s guides for free. Share the user manual or guide on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
591 Staff settings Display Transpose This is used when preparing parts for instruments that are not scored at the actual concert key. For example, if you want the note C3 to be played by an alto sax, you have to score it as an A3 – nine semitones up. Luckily, the Display Transpose setting takes care of this for you: •Use the pop-up menu to select the instrument for which you are scoring. •If the pop-up menu does not list your instrument, you can set the desired transposition with the Semitones value field. ÖThe Display Transpose setting does not affect play- back or the actual pitch of the notes – it only changes how they are displayed and printed. You can also insert Display Transpose changes anywhere in the score, by inserting a key change symbol and using the Transpose setting in the Edit Key/Clef dialog (see “Display Transpose in the Edit Key dialog” on page 566). •In the Score Settings dialog, on the Project page (“Chord Symbols” subpage), deactivate the “Use Display Transpose” option if you do not want the chord symbols to be affected by the Display Transpose setting (see “Chord Symbols” on page 643). •You can disable Display Transpose by deactivating the “Display Transpose” button on the toolbar of the Score Editor. For more information, see “Transposing instruments” on page 565. The Options tab Clicking the Options tab in the dialog brings up another page with additional settings. Below follows a brief descrip - tion of these, with references to more detailed explanations. Switches OptionDescription Flat BeamsActivate this when you want the beams over notes to be flat (as opposed to slanted), see “Beam appearance and slant settings” on page 612. No BeamsActivate this when you do not want any beaming at all on the staff (for example for vocal scoring), see “Turning beaming on/off” on page 608. Beam SubgroupsUse this when you want sixteenth notes displayed under a beam to be divided into groups of four notes, see “Han-dling beam groups” on page 611. Without and with Beam Subgroups. 16th SubgroupsUse this when you want even smaller subgroups of six-teenth notes. This setting has no effect if Beam Sub-groups is deactivated. As above, but with 16th Subgroups activated.
592 Staff settings System Sizes This section allows you to set the number of system lines and to control spacing between the lines: Score Drum Map These settings are described in the chapter “Scoring for drums” on page 676. 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 (see “Setting up a staff for drum scoring” on page 679). 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. 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 instru - ment, this makes it easy to find notes that are outside of this instrument’s note range. ÖIf 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). These settings are described in the chapter “Polyphonic voicing” on page 593. The Tablature tab This tab contains settings for creating tablature scores. The settings are described in the chapter “Creating tabla- ture” on page 680. OptionDescription System LinesThe number of lines in a system. For regular scoring, this should be set to 5. Add SpaceAllows you to increase or decrease the space between the lines in a system. SizeAllows 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.
594 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 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 splitpoint can be “floating”. The program can even automat - ically put a bass line on the lower clef for you. 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. See “Adding and editing notes” on page 576 for details. Overlapping notes Throughout this chapter you encounter the term “overlap- ping 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 poly- phonic voices. !Each voice is polyphonic. In other words, one voice can contain chords.
595 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 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. There are also a few important things to note: ÖWhen 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 dia - log, 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 chan - nels 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. ÖWhen 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: 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.Pull down 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 re -fer to them as voices 1 to 8. 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. 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, see “Cue notes” on page 614. 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. !Do not confuse the voice numbers with the MIDI channel setting for each voice. !If two voices are set to the same MIDI channel, the lower voice is treated as if it were turned off.
596 Polyphonic voicing 10.Decide on a stem direction for each voice, by select- ing 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 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 604. 11.If you want the notes in a voice to be smaller than regu- lar 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, see “Automatically – the Explode function” on page 598. 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 are moved to active voices. If you click “Ignore”, nothing is changed, and some notes are hidden. However, they are not lost, they ap - pear 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 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 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 auto - matically set to Up!
597 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. • If you use voices for resolving the problem of overlapping notes (see “Overlapping notes” on page 594), 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 inter - vals, 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 re- quired. 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. Entering notes into voices When you add new notes, you need to decide which voice they go into: 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 corre- sponding button. Any notes you enter from now on are inserted into that voice. Voice 3 activated for insertion 6.Insert the notes as usual, see “Adding and editing notes” on page 576. 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. 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 621. 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.
598 Polyphonic voicing Moving notes between voices Manually To manually move notes to another voice, proceed as fol- lows: 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. 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 cate- gory of the Key Commands dialog on the File menu. Automatically – the Explode function The Explode function distributes notes, either onto new tracks (see “The Explode function” on page 572) 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 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: 4.Click OK. The notes are distributed to different voices. OptionDescription Split NoteUse this to move all notes below a certain pitch to an-other voice. Lines To TracksUse this when you want all musical “lines” to be put in one voice each. The notes with the highest pitch goes to the first voice, the notes with the second highest pitch goes to the second, and so on. Bass To Lowest VoiceWhen this is activated, the lowest notes always ends up in the lowest voice.
599 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 that you understand how this connection works. • Cubase only: You can use the Logical Editor (see the chapter “The Logical Editor, Transformer, and Input Transformer” on page 440) to put notes into voices, based on other more com- plex 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 601). • 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 602). Handling rests With polyphonic voices, you often get more rest symbols than desired. •If a voice does not need any rests at all, you can deacti- vate rests separately for this voice on the Polyphonic tab of the Staff page in the Score Settings dialog. •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 do not “collide” in the score, by adjusting their verti - cal 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 665) 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 do not 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 571), 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 for one single voice 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 is 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 that the “Display Quantize tool affects all Voices” option is deactivated. 2.Select the voice for which you want 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 activated in the Score Settings dialog on the Project–Notation Style subpage (Miscellaneous category), the Display Quantize settings always affects all voices (even if you do not press [Alt]/[Option] and click).
600 Polyphonic voicing 3.Select the Display Quantize tool. 4.Click at the position at which you want to insert the event. The Display Quantize dialog appears. 5.Fill out the dialog as described in the section “Display Quantize and Interpretation Options” on page 588. 6.Click Apply. Creating crossed voicings Often, for example in vocal scoring, you 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 is 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 dialog on the 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. 8.Select the two notes that you want to 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.