NOTION Music Forum

Somebody tell me how to work around this? http://www.broadheath.com/files/orphan-notehead.notion

Thanks,

wilhoit wrote:Somebody tell me how to work around this? http://www.broadheath.com/files/orphan-notehead.notion

Thanks,

I am guessing that there is a specific reason for having two voices on one staff, since the obvious solution is to put each voice on a separate staff . . .

So, I did a few experiments, and I see no way to avoid the problem of trying to fit two things into the same space . . .

[NOTE: For contextual reference, this is a screen capture of the problem as observed in the NOTION score you posted (see above) . . . ]



Nevertheless, if you explicitly change the stem direction for the eighth notes as a set to "stem up" and then change the stem direction for the half note to "stem down", this provides a nice solution . . .



You could reverse the voices, which works for this particular measure, but whether it will work in other scenarios depends . . .



However, in one experiment I changed the single staff to a grand staff; selected the second voice (purple) and cut it, followed by pasting it to the bass staff. Then I changed bass staff to a treble staff, thereby creating a double-treble grand staff . . .

[NOTE: This is based on something I discovered earlier today about switching a single staff to a grand staff'; and it is an interesting technique to use when working with two voices on a single staff, where the strategy is temporarily to change the single staff to a grand staff, followed by doing the cut and paste step, and then making the bass clef a treble clef. This way you can work with each voice separately but merge them back to a single line later, and then go back-and-forth easily, with the only requirement being to remember to change the bass clef to a treble clef each time you switch to a grand staff. And this technique works with the other types of clefs, since software engineers understand mathematics and are not going to write a separate and independent algorithm for each type of clef. Instead they most likely get it working for the treble clef and then add conditional code to make it specific to the other clefs based on algebra or whatever, which is one of the reasons I do nearly everything with soprano treble clef staves, which combined with transposition, is mathematically elegant as compared to having a virtual festival of different clefs, which mostly is a big mess and certainly is not mathematically elegant. There are 12 notes and 10 or so octaves nearly all the time here in the sound isolation studio, and I put all of them on soprano treble clef staves, which keeps everything very simple . . . ]



This makes it easier to work with the notes, and if you change the grand staff back to a single staff the two voices are on the same staff . . .

However, if you repeat the process, you need to change the bass staff to a treble staff. The split notes stay on the "bass" staff, so you do not need to redo that part . . .

From my perspective, no matter how it is done, multivoice parts are a bit messy visually unless the note for each voice is sufficiently different but with identical timing and duration, which essentially is like playing chords on a piano, where there is only one specific key for each note (hence no collisions) . . .

Summarizing, I think this is the way it is, and except for putting each voice on a different staff; using a custom double-treble grand staff; swapping voices; or adjusting note stem directions, I have not found any other solutions, although one of these four solutions should work . . .

Lots of FUN!

Thanks very much for taking the time to play around with this; particularly for capturing the screenshots, which make it much easier to talk about what is going on.

Your first suggestion is to run away from the problem by using open score. There are two reasons to use open score and two reasons not to. Both of the pro reasons are Notion-specific: (a) things like this and (b) the chasing of dynamics. The anti reasons are more subjective: (c) it seems to have gone out of fashion, if it was ever really in fashion (the first edition of Nielsen's Symphony 2, ca. 1902, is a locus classicus); (d) it just makes the score way too tall for my taste; my customary 2222 4330 timp str blows out to 24 staves in open score, whereas with pairs of like instruments on the same staff, it is only 16 staves, which I find much more readable.

As to your workarounds, they are better, but still do not conform to standard engraving practice. The original manifestation of the problem (the first of your screenshots) simply could not be shown to anyone with a straight face; but the only problem with it is the fact that the first downward stem is attached to the hollow notehead instead of to the "orphan" solid notehead that has no stem at all. (Anyhow, Notion is not allowed to tell me what I can give to my first or second clarinettist.)

I'll play with the grand-staff expedient for open score and also try the effect of changing the "voice stem mode" settings.

Thanks,

Actually, there is a third reason not to use open score, which is that the samples get doubled in a2 passages, with the horribly familiar destructive-interference effect. But Notion has "tacet", which could be used in a2 passages in open score, if it doesn't affect printing. (It shouldn't (!), but the manual does not specifically address that point. Let's try an experiment...it doesn't affect printing. Good.)

(I wonder whether the grand-staff trick would also suppress the doubling of the samples, because the grand staff is a single audio channel. Is the world that perfect...?)

If you don't use open score, how do you handle parts? Notion can't separate voices on the same staff into individual parts.