I can make a chord where the top note is a half-note, the next a quarter-note and the lowest, a quarter note. However
I never can make a chord where the top is a half-note, the next is a quarter-note and the lowest is another half-note.
It will not let me do it... so I convert the lowest to a quarter-note (or the same as the 2nd value)
so half,quarter,quarter chord works but half, quarter, half does not.
You need to use layering if you want to do that.
I was afraid of that. One or two chords in the whole piece and it seems I have to create yards of bars!?
I'll just cheap on the last. Thanks for your input.
Yeah, it can be a bit of a pain sometimes, but it isn't really that hard. Make one bar with a hidden whole rest and a barline and copy and paste it as many times as needed to get to the place where you need the chord. You can even copy and paste it say, 4 times, then copy and paste the 4 bar block to make it go faster.
Or just copy the whole staff onto a new staff, select the whole new staff, mute all the notes, and then change and unmute only the ones you need. (NOTE: you can't just use the staff-muting function: that won't allow individual notes to be unmuted. But selecting the whole staff and then muting all notes simultaneously is almost as quick. The process: press <alt><enter> to bring up the Properties dialog, choose the Notes tab, and click on the check box marked "mute".)
Incidentally, layers are the primary method of mixing notes of different durations on the same staff in EVERY notation program that I know of. NWC is no different in that respect, except that it allows unlimited layers. Most other notation programs limit you to four.
I have a tool you would need to download and install. Create a new staff and copy an existing staff to it. When you run restStaff on it, you should have a staff full of whole rests keeping clefs, key signatures, etc. intact. restStaff.js (https://wjporter.com/nwc/restStaff.js)