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| From: | Tim McNamara |
| Subject: | Hello! and question about jazz chords |
| Date: | Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:09:58 -0600 |
Thus far I have been using LP to create jazz lead sheets and- once past the initial learning curve- I've able to set a half dozen songs into lead sheet format with nice output in the past week or so; and the \transpose function is cool beyond words. These have replaced barely legible handwritten charts with neat and legible music (and transposed for the horns in a few seconds! W00t!).
But with jazz lead sheets there has been one problem, which has been commented on in some previous threads- the use of routine jazz chord extensions. I have not been able to figure out how to get LP to print anything like a m7b5 or a 7#9 or a 7b9 using \chordmode. This is difficult with a song like "Angel Eyes" which has a good half- dozen of these types of chords. Currently I am writing in those extensions by hand because it's just the simplest solution. Looking at the archives there seemed to be various solutions that seemed rather kludgy to me. It seems like I ought to be able to type something like d2:m7b5 and get that chord on the page. I am used to the Real Book chord expression conventions, which are familiar to most if not all jazz musicians and are more or less the de facto standard in the US, at least.
I don't know if this is just newbie error or a limitation of LP. If it makes a difference, I use LP 2.12.2-1 on Mac OS X 10.4.11. Am I just missing the part in the various manuals that shows how to do this? Or is there some other reasonable solution without introducing large amounts of code (I saw the ones to make use of lyrics or \markup instead of chords; lots of work went into that, I am sure!). It may be that I did not find the documentation or the thread that provides the "best" answer when I searched the archives- if so, my apologies.
Tim
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