• If you are scoring for vocals, you simply need one voice for each voice, so to speak.
• Often you will use voices for resolving the problem of overlapping notes (see page 130), for example when scoring for piano. In this case, you will need two voices each time two notes overlap. If three notes overlap, you will need three voices. In other words you will need to check for the “worst case” (largest number of overlapping notes at a certain position) and activate that many. If you don’t know how many notes you need when starting out to prepare a score, don’t worry, you can add more voices later.
• Voices 1 and 2 on the upper staff and 5 and 6 on the lower are special. These handle “collisions” (notes with small intervals, accidentals that otherwise would come too close, etc) automatically which the other voices don’t. Always use these voices first!
• An example: in the situation below, three voices are required. The lowest note overlaps both the “melody” and the chords, so it can’t share a voice with the chords. The chords overlap the melody, so they can’t share a voice either.