reference.book Page 207 Monday, August 31, 2009 2:47 PM
2.36 Voices Figure 1
Figure 2
Notations
Figure 3
To split the music in Figure 1 above into two voices (to produce Figure 3), do the following: Select the music you want to split as a passage Choose Edit Filter Notes in Chords (For Copying) Bottom Note or Single Notes (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Alt+B or B), then choose voice 2 on the Keypad or Edit Voice 2 (shortcut Alt+2 or 2); your music will now look like Figure 2 Finally, change the note values to consolidate unnecessarily tied notes (or use the Combine Tied
Notes and Rests plug-in – see Combine Tied Notes and Rests on page 532); you should end up with Figure 3. You can’t split voices with tuplets in – Sibelius will omit one of the voices where the tuplet occurs.
Voices 3 and 4 Add voices 3 and 4 just like voice 2. If you want three voices, you can use voices 1+2+3 or 1+2+4 depending on the stem directions you want the voices to have. The stems of voices 1 and 3 point upwards, and those of voices 2 and 4 point downwards. There are no particular rules for how to position three or more voices, so you may need to move notes horizontally to avoid collisions. See Crossing voices below.
Swapping voices If you start creating music into the wrong voice, then instead of scrapping it and starting again you can just select the music as a passage and swap the voices round. The various options are in Edit Voice. You’re only likely to want to swap voices 1 and 2, for which you can type the shortcut Shift-V.
Copying voices To copy a single voice from a staff containing notes in more than one voice, select the passage you want to copy and use, say, Edit Filter Voice 2 (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Alt+2 or 2) to filter only the notes in voice 2. Now you can Alt+click or -click them into another staff as normal. Sibelius copies notes and rests into the same voice as the voice they came from. However, if you want to copy from one voice to another...
Copying from one voice to another Use Plug-ins Notes and Rests Paste Into Voice – see Paste Into Voice on page 516. If you want to copy from one voice to another manually, do this by swapping voices. For instance, suppose you want to copy some voice 1 notes into voice 2 elsewhere: 207