Band parts - a newbie's view

[Anthony W. Youngman]

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Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 23:48:15 +0100
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From: "Anthony W. Youngman" <address@hidden>
Subject: Band parts - a newbie's view
User-Agent: Turnpike/6.02-U (<kadi9FnjOBL6XNAiRMnYuwUxdX>)

Quick bio - I'm a professional programmer and amateur musician ...

I'm trying to set some band parts, and I'm using 2.2.2 on cygwin. Okay, 
some things are probably me trying to do things the "wrong" way, but 
some things appear to be bugs...

What I'm trying to do is make stuff generic - not repeat stuff across 
files - and some things are annoying while at least one thing appears to 
be a bug...

I've put all the header info - title, composer etc into a "header.ly" 
file. I include this in a part file, followed by a "header { instrument 
= }" section. This second header section appears to wipe the first :-( 
at any rate, all I get is the instrument name and everything else is 
lost. Commenting out the second section means the first one appears ...

And the instrument is in the wrong place ... it gets put in the middle 
of the header :-( As far as I'm concerned, on a part it belongs left 
justified just above the first stave, and presumably on a score it 
belongs just above or to the left of the relevant stave.

Okay - having moaned - how do I fix this the way I want? Do I need to 
install source or can it be done in Scheme as part of the standard user 
install? And if I need the source, what language is it? C++? I want to 
make the header print the way I want :-), and I presume I need to add a 
Staff.Instrument property to get that to print properly in a score...

Another annoying thing when trying to produce parts ... I've found that 
putting time signatures, speed markings etc in a separate "part" is 
great for getting timings right etc. Unfortunately, it seems that "s" 
and "\skip" are classed as notes, so when I try to collapse bars with 
the R syntax in the part, it doesn't work :-( (as an aside, how do I do 
multi-bar rests with a time signature of eg 9/8? Does R1*9/8*n work?)

Two other annoyances (and in my mind they're UI blunders ...). 
Practically every piece of music I've played that has letter rehearsal 
marks DOES use the letter I. It's fine to have a default that doesn't, 
but the manual appears to say "our tradition doesn't use it, therefore 
we won't let you use it". Bad! Where do I change it? And do I have the 
option of passing a list of marks for it to use?

The other is, if I ask for a time signature of 3/4, that's what I get. 
Or 9/8. Or 6/8. Or 5/4 or almost anything. But if I ask for 2/2 or 4/4, 
then that's what I DON'T get. Bad bad bad! If I want common or 
cut-common, then I should be able to ask for that directly. And in my 
experience 4/4 and common are not the same thing - I often play pieces 
that have both ...

Have any of these points been addressed post 2.2.2? And if not, where 
and how do I go about "fixing" them?

Cheers,
Wol
-- 
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999



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