Re: [Denemo-devel] Initial Clef - Transposing: How do I ... / Why does Denemo...

[Richard Shann]

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 02:00 +0200, Nils Gey wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> today I wrote a piece for mens choir. 2 tenors, 2 basses. After finishing the 
> two Tenors I noticed that I used the normal treble/violin clef instead of the 
> octava bassa, which is used for tenor-voices normally. So everything looked 
> fine, except the little "8" in the clef was missing, and it sounded one 
> octave to high in the sound output of Denemo.
> 
Is the final product to be a midi file or a printed page?
I'll assume the latter.
> "No problem" I thought and changed the initial clef to octava bassa. But 
> Denemo now shifts all notes up one octave so it sounds the same as before, 
> which is the opposite of what I wanted and expected. 
> 
The goodish news is that there is no serious problem, even though Denemo
does not yet have a command for editing an entire selection at once.
> Why does Denemo transpose this automatically?
You have the wrong model for what the Denemo display means.
Denemo didn't transpose anything. If you put a clef and notes, you are
communicating to Denemo what pitch notes you want, not what they should
look like. In a graphics painting program, when you put something
somewhere you are saying what you want the page to look like. But Denemo
is not that.
>  Me, the composer, is responsible in which clef I put noteheads on the lines. 
> If I want to change from treble to bass clef but want the noteheads to stay 
> on the same lines its not possible atm, I think.
> 
This is logical, and is what LilyPond would do if you changed the clef
at the beginning. After all you have said what notes you want, so
changing the clef will not change the notes, just how they are drawn.

> So how do I do that? Changing clef and keep/restore the orginal positions of 
> the noteheads? 
You can do several things. 
1) Change the clef back so that it means the correct notes, and in the
LilyPond window edit the line that says 
\clef treble
before this staff's music. It needs to say \clef something else (have a
look at what it says for octava bassa clef at the moment).

2) Instead, put a LilyPond directive (Other->Insert/Edit LilyPond) 
\transpose c c, {
at the start of the first measure and
}
at the end of the last measure.

This tells LilyPond that all the notes between { and } are to be down
one octave (use \transpose c c'  {......} for up one).

> Is there a way to tranpose a complete staff/voice? Actually not transposing 
> but shifting. Or my feature-wish to shift a selection up and down. Or change 
> the behaviour that the clef is not related to the position of the noteheads 
> at all to the moment where you want to hear a sound. So if I change the clef 
> the notes stay on their position but have a different meaning. (This is what 
> I would prefer).
> 
No, there are no Denemo built-ins for this sort of thing. We need them.
The bad case is if you forget the keysignature, you cannot easily get
what you want - the notes looked right but where you put f you meant
f-sharp, and I am not sure there is any easy work around for that even
now.

Richard