Re: Full measure rests in 3/4 time

[Dominic Neumann]

2007/9/4, Tomas Valusek <address@hidden>:

Hello,

> There really is no mysetery here.  r2. gives you a dotted half-note
> rest.  In 3/4 time, R2. gives you a full-measure rest.  Use whichever
> type of rest you want to see in your score.
>
> Please note that there is a difference between 4 beats of rest (r1) and
> a whole-measure rest ( R +beats_in_your_bar )

I find i bit of bureaucracy in Lilypond. If this tool is primarily for musicians, than it should respect musical way of using symbols. If it's for computer freaks, than it can obey programmers' way of thinking.

Why I say this? Whole-bar rest is a shortcut, used in multi-part scores to indicate a rest for a whole measure REGARDLESS of beats contained in specific measures. So I think that requiring duration for R symbol is anoyance for musicians. I should be able to say R and lilypond should use proper length for such rest. Instead, I'm forced to remember a specific time signature, since R is just a name of symbol, not a function returning proper duration. And if Lilypond's philosophy is "do automatically all what you can do", than R should never require additional length modifier, since it should always say "it's a whole-measure rest, and Lilypond knows well, how many beats this measure contains".

It should be even possible to say e.g. 4R, where two measures are 2/4 and another two 3/4 - time-signature engraver is score-wide, not staff wide by default.

And what happens if you then change the time-signature of the two 2/4 measures to one with 4/4? Then everything gets shifted ... I don´t think this is what you want to have, do you?

Dominic