Re: First Lilypond Score

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Aw man, I meant to send this to the user list!  Sorry about that.

-Jonathan

--- On Fri, 7/31/09, Jonathan Wilkes <address@hidden> wrote:

> From: Jonathan Wilkes <address@hidden>
> Subject: First Lilypond Score
> To: address@hidden
> Date: Friday, July 31, 2009, 9:18 PM
> I made my first lilypond score for
> more than one instrument, and I 
> thought I'd give some comments on some of the things that
> were really 
> difficult from a beginner's perspective.  I think it
> would be helpful to 
> have a section in the LM on "migrating from
> Finale/Sibelius", or a 
> separate document, if there isn't one already.
> 
> I'm sure some of the following issues will become easier
> for me once I 
> go through the docs again and do some more projects, but I
> imagine other 
> first time users might run into some of these, so here are
> my 
> "first project" experiences.
> 
> slurs - I had a lot of "cannot end slur" problems early on,
> evidently 
> because I was trying to end a slur in a different voice
> (which isn't a 
> problem in Finale).  Also, longer slurs ( more than a
> measure ) were often 
> a little flat: the middle of the slur would get way too
> close to a notehead, tie, or something else.  Since
> there are so many settings for 
> slurs, I didn't have time to figure out how to do a global
> override to 
> make them more curvy.
> 
> cross-staff tremolos - when doing a "\repeat tremolo 4 {
> c16 d }", you 
> can't put a "\change" inside the brackets, so I had to use
> an 
> "\autochange" to get cross-staff tremolos.
> 
> vertical spacing - toward the end of the process, I needed
> to move a staff 
> in the second system down slightly, and the only way I
> could find to do 
> this was in the NR using explicit vertical spacing. 
> Since you have to 
> use a list of numbers to specify the offsets for each
> staff, it's 
> complicated to do this.  What I wanted was a way to
> say
> \override
> Vertical-Distance-From-This-Staff-To-The-One-Below #'padding
> = #'[number of staff spaces]
> or maybe \nudgeNextStaff #2.  Is there anything like
> this?
> 
> internals reference- I found myself going into the
> internals reference 
> way too often.  Of course this is a good thing in
> order to gain more 
> control over one's score, but a lot of it was wasting time,
> for example: 
> spending 10 minutes to build and test a macro to flip a
> tuplet position 
> when \tupletUp & \tupletDown already exist.
> 
> I'll keep this in mind the next time through the docs, and
> see if there's 
> something I overlooked, or that is missing, about the built
> in commands. 
> 
> Pedagogically, btw, I think these macros are great. 
> If someone who uses 
> Finale sees "\slurUp d( e)", it's pretty easy to comprehend
> that "Hey, 
> that's basically the same as selecting a slur with the
> mouse and using 
> ctrl-f to flip it up.  And no mousing!"  Whereas
> seeing:
> \once \override Slur #'direction = #UP d( e)
> means "dear lord, I have to learn a programming language
> just to move 
> a slur? No thank you."
> 
> spacing - basically, if there is a macro just to nudge a
> note column to 
> the left or right, and to turn on some kind of piano staff
> dynamic spacing so dynamics are placed in the middle, I
> think that would make it so that 
> overrides are only necessary for more "advanced" stuff.
> 
> \mark - This is really handy.  Would be cool if
> spanners could be used 
> with \mark so accel., rit., a tempo, etc., could be used.
> 
> resizing staff/score - since layout-set-staff-size does not
> 
> resize the distance between staff lines, what's the best
> way to, say, 
> make the pianostaff larger than the other instruments?
> 
> Finally, if anyone has tips on 'final touches', I'd
> appreciate it.
> Basically I'm used to making a final pass through a score,
> and nudging 
> a few notes/staves, to improve spacing and
> readability.  What's the 
> easiest way to touch up the final score in Lilypond?
> 
> Lilypondtool is great, btw.  Looking forward to trying
> out the new 
> version.
> 
> Thanks,
> Jonathan
> 
> 
>       
>