User manual

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Polyphonic voicing
Background: 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 756 for details.
Overlapping notes
Throughout this chapter you encounter the term “overlapping 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 polyphonic 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 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:
Ö 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 warns if this happens). In other words, do not
change the MIDI channels 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.
Ö When 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.
!
Each voice is polyphonic. In other words, one voice can contain chords.