How to write overlapping voices?

• May 11, 2025 - 05:15

Hello, guys.

I'm having some difficulty with writing the music for piano in the screenshot below. The voices are overlapping and I can't find a solution for it. Does anyone have any suggestion?


Comments

Not sure how to make it. I tried and got some odd results (but it's the middle of the night and I'm LONG overdue for sleep :-)

However, I see a (minor!!!) mistake in the original. The F, E (stems down, on beat 3) should be a dotted quarter ... or else there should be an eighth rest following, at the same time as the C.

It requires three Voices -
1] G, F-F, G
2] A+E, F+E, B+E
3] (rests), E-D-C

The third beat is ambiguous - is that low F a crotchet or a dotted crotchet?. If it is a dotted crotchet then why not play with the left hand (attach it to the higher F)? If it is a crotchet then it should have a quaver rest after it to make it clear the F + E are shorter.

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In reply to by underquark

Your observation makes a lot of sense. I'm not a pianist, so I don't know if it's a "piano writing thing" or just a weird/wrong way of writing. I'll talk to some pianists and see what they think. But it doesn't make sense to me also...

Either way, when I try to write it in the way you described I get an odd result. The dotted crochet (high F) get inside the eighth note group. Which makes it very hard (damn near impossible) to read.

Can you walk me through your writing? Like, which voice did you wrote first?

In reply to by jalowyjsamuel

Write 3 voices as shown. Adjust the offset in the propeties (F8) to 2sp and 4sp respectively.
I am not a graduated pianist, but it seems to me that the quarter in the second voice indicates the way to play this passage. This is the fingering I came up with. One needs some time to leap to Bb3 with the right thumb. And it would be difficult to slant the wrist to allow 5-4 fingercrossing (F4-Gb4) with the thumb being burdened with the necessity of playing F3.

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In reply to by jalowyjsamuel

My mistake! I just realized that I have to select the appearance function in order to edit the "note as a whole" (if that makes sense as I'm writing it).

So, for anyone interested, the correct offset setting for this change is located at the appearance function. It only shows after you click the appearance button. There's an offset setting for different parts of the note (head and stem) that one doesn't offset the beam.

Thank you for the input everybody that commented on my question!
It would be nice to connect sometime with people that are interested in this. My Instagram account is @samuel.trpt

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