NOTION Music Forum

I originally entered a sketch piece in 4 parts on a piano staff, each part with it's own voice. I used the 4 voices available in Notion to do so. Having done that, I wanted to separate each voice out on it's own staff, and I know there is not automated way to do that in Notion.

So I created empty S, A, T, and B staffs, copied the piano staff and pasted it into the empty Soprano staff. The results is voices 1 and 2 paste onto the Soprano staff and voices 3 and 4 paste onto the Alto staff. I then cut the Alto staff (with voices 3 and 4) and paste it to the Tenor staff (which then holds voices 3 and 4 and leaves the Alto staff empty again. To recap, at that point, Soprano hold voices 1 and 2, Alto is empty, Tenor holds voices 3 and 4, and Bass is empty.

I proceed to select all notes in Voice 2 on the Soprano staff, cut them, and paste them into the Alto staff. I do the same with the Tenor staff, cutting voice 4 and pasting it into the Bass staff. This results in Soprano holding voice 1, Alto voice 2, Tenor Voice 3, and Bass voice 4. So far so good, though it's a whole lot more work than it ought to be.

But I still need to put all four of my resulting staves into voice 1 because I don't want to mess with voices when I proceed to full orchestration. So I select the Alto staff holding voice 2 and execute Swap Voices, which transfers all the notes to voice 1, still on the Alto staff. So far so good.

Now comes the problem. If I select the Tenor staff, which holds voice 3, and execute Swap Voices it doesn't allow me to swap into voice 1, only voice 4. And the reverse is true with the Bass staff. When I try to swap voice 4 for voice 1 I get voice 3 instead.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem? How do I start with a staff of notes in voice 3 or voice 4 and end up with the notes in voice 1?

Hi DaddyO,

It isn't possible to move notes from Voice 3 or 4 to Voice 1 (or 2). I have submitted this as a feature request a long time ago, but as we know, it sometimes takes a long time before feature requests become actual features — and sometimes it never happens, at least not in the way we envisioned it... However, the Admin has hinted that Notion is working on improving the editing capabilities, so let's hope that this is on the to-do list. Admin...?

Best wishes,
Thorrild

OK, thanks for the reply thorrild.

I've gone ahead an manually re-entered all the notes in the piece in the staves for voices 3 and 4. Fortunately mostly half and quarter notes. Took me a half hour. I could have been working on composing during that time, but then again I could have lived in an age before the wonders of notation software.

Let's hope this functionality makes it into production soon. It makes zero sense to me to have a Swap Voices command in a four voice environment that limits you to swapping between 1 and 2 or 3 and 4. I'm sure there's an arcane reason why the initial programming had this limitation.

DaddyO wrote:Let's hope this functionality makes it into production soon. It makes zero sense to me to have a Swap Voices command in a four voice environment that limits you to swapping between 1 and 2 or 3 and 4. I'm sure there's an arcane reason why the initial programming had this limitation.

+1