\pitchnames and drumpitch-init.ly

[Stacey Campbell]

Hi,

I've been on a quest for about a month to find a working MIDI sequencer
for my RedHat 7.2 box with a 2.4.16 kernel and 0.5 or 0.9 ALSA drivers.
I've tried literally everything out there (I think), jazz++, tse3 stuff
(including NoteEdit), MusE, the latest Rosegarden, and so on.  I've even
tried running Cakewalk programs using Wine.

Anyways, I've been running LilyPond 1.5.28 for a few days, and as
crazy as this may sound, this is one of the most stable and usable
MIDI sequencers available for a Linux platform.  I've been able to
create multi-instrument -- including drums -- MIDI files, integrate
portions of other MIDI files using midi2ly, etc.  The text mode
entry using vi is, for me, much easier and faster than the various
mostly-broken GUI sequencers out there.  (I record MIDI sequences
using jazz++ as this is one of the few things it seems to be able
to do reliably.)

However I've run into a problem with the drums support in lilypond.
When I:

\include "drumpitch-init.ly"

I appear to lose the previous settings for \pitchnames, which makes
things like:

Key = \notes \key c \major

...blow up on the letter 'c'.  My hack was to create a new pitchnames
file that, in one big \pitchames setting, includes all of
drumpitch-init.ly as well as everything in english.ly.  I still
haven't figured out how to use this kludge to render the drum notes
as they should be in the paper output (I get lisp-y type errors when
I try various things, and I haven't written any lisp in 18 years).

If someone knows a way to have the following two lines in a .ly file:

\include "drumpitch-init.ly"
Key = \notes \key c \major

...I'd be muchly interested.

Thanks,

Stacey Campbell
http://www.pigtailproductions.com/stacey/