"Splitting" a chord?

• Sep 4, 2023 - 06:14

Having resolved my other instances of stems crossing staves (the docs are incomplete re MS4), I now have a similar instance, but in this case a chord needs to be "split," i.e. one note needs to be separated from the other two so there are two separate stems rather than one stem for the entire chord.

The attached picture shows the goal; there are three notes in the lower staff, one of which has its stem going down, the other two with their combined stem reaching up into the upper staff. However, since MS treats it as a chord, there is only one stem for all three notes. I believe I've read everything in the handbook that mentions the word "chord," and didn't see anything that would accomplish this (or at least didn't recognize anything that would help).

I tried turning off the stem completely, and then selecting a single note, but MS still sees it as part of the chord, so the stems can't be operated on separately.

Cross-staff notation moves the entire chord, so doesn't help, and in any case, the two notes aren't in the other staff, they're just connected to the other staff.

Is there a way to accomplish this, i.e. have two separate stems on the three notes in a chord, or (worded differently) "split" the chord so that the two notes are considered separate from the other note?

Attachment Size
split-chord.png 116.18 KB

Comments

In reply to by Brer Fox

Thanks. I'm not a musician and know little about it, I'm just trying to replicate a score for a book. I don't really understand "voices," (and would never have connected that to splitting the chord into different pieces), but playing around with it for a few minutes yielded what I was after. Thanks for the pointer.

I accidentally even managed to get the rests beneath the lower staff notes in the places I needed them; I changed the wrong note to voice 2, and when I changed it back to voice 1 the rests magically appeared. I don't know what that's about, but I needed them, so I'll take it. :)

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