Re: Not happy with results

[Maximilian Albert]

>     The crescendo at the beginning of the second line is
>     much longer for Alto and 2nd Bass than for Soprano, Tenor and 1st
>     Bass, and
>     of course it's not supposed to.

Do you want the longer crescendos to be shortened or vice versa? I
suppose the latter because otherwise you would probably have written the
*.ly file in a different way.

As Yota pointed out, ...

> here the crescendo start on a "a" and end on a "d" (not after the "d"
> but on it... and if the "d" is the first note in a bar, the typographic
> rule says to stop the hairpin at the bar... even if you can disable this
> behaviour, have a look at the doc)

... hairpins corresponding to (de-)crescendos which end on the first
note in a bar stop at the barline by default. The relevant property
controlling this is 'hairpinToBarline'. Just insert

   \set hairpinToBarline = ##f

at the beginning of your score to change this behaviour. See also the
file hairpin-to-barline.ly in the regression tests which you can find at

    http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.11/input/regression/collated-files

.

Note, however, that even with this setting the crescendi will still have
different length because lily also somehow takes the duration of the
notes (halves and quarters in our case) into account. The tweak I
sometimes use to correct this uses an invisible temporary second voice
containing two quarters instead of a half note. The end of the crescendo
is then attached to the second of these invisible quarters. For example,
changing the beginning of line 18 in your file as follows

   line 18 old: d'2^\mf^\< e4 (h)    g2^\!             [...]
   line 18 new: d'2^\mf^\< e4 (h) << g2 {s4 s4^\!} >>  [...]

yields a crescendo which has precisely the same length as the one in the
alto voice.

I am almost certain, however, that this is not the "standard" way to
achieve this. I would be glad to know if someone had a better solution.

Cheers,
Max


P.S.: BTW, I suppose you write (for example) d^\< instead of d\< in
order to place the dynamics above the staves instead of below (where
they are placed by default). Section "6.6.3 Dynamics" in the manual
mentions the command \dynamicUp which, when inserted at the beginning of
your music, achieves this behaviour without all the manual overrides
using '^'. This can save you a lot of typing and IMHO also makes the
file more readable.