Re: mixing notehead styles in chords

[Steve Yegge]

Yes it does!  Thank you very much (and to Patrick as well).

Clearly I need to look more closely at the tweak facility.

Thanks again.

-steve

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Kees van den Doel <address@hidden> wrote:

Does this do the job?

h = #(define-music-function (parser location note) (ly:music?)
 (set!
  (ly:music-property note 'tweaks)
  (acons 'style 'cross
  (ly:music-property note 'tweaks)))
 note)

 \relative c' {
     <a-0 e'-2 a-3 c-1 e-0>8

     <a \h e' \h a \h c e>

     <a e' a c e>

     <a \h e' \h a \h c e>

     <a e' a c e>

     <a \h e' \h a \h c e>

     <a e' a c e>

     <a \h e' \h a \h c e>
   }

Kees

----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Yegge <address@hidden>
Date: Monday, March 23, 2009 9:13 pm
Subject: mixing notehead styles in chords
To: address@hidden

> Hello,
>
> In flamenco and bossa-nova guitar music it is quite
> common to damp some (but not all) strings with the
> left hand while strumming.  The standard notation for
> this is to have cross-noteheads on the damped strings
> and normal noteheads on the strings that should ring.
>
> Lilypond makes it extremely tedious to deal with this
> relatively common situation.  It's easy to have the entire
> chord drawn with x-noteheads, but much more difficult
> to get only some of the notes to have x-noteheads.
>
> For instance, let's say we're notating the strumming of
> eighth-note open A-minor chords, like so:
>
>     \relative c' {
>       <a-0 e'-2 a-3 c-1 e-0>8
>      
>      
>      
>
>      
>      
>      
>      
>     }
>
>

> So far the music only needs one voice, and it prints in
> an easy-to-read (for guitarists) stacked notation, with one
> stem per chord.
>
> But let's say we want every other chord to be partly
> damped:  strings 2, 3 and 4 have x-noteheads, and
> strings 1 and 5 have normal noteheads.  We don't want
> any other visible changes to the print representation --
> in particular, this is not polyphonic music, so we don't
> want up- and down- stems in the same measure, nor
> notes from any given chord to be horizontally shifted.
> We just want every other chord to have its middle three
> noteheads be crosses.
>
> The only way to accomplish this, as far as I can tell,
> requires many manual steps for each measure:
>   - split the music _expression_ into two voices
>   - copy the chords into the second voice
>   - delete all the normal-notehead notes from one voice
>   - delete the cross-notehead notes from the other voice
>   - make the stems and beams in the top voice invisible
>   - turn off note-column collision warnings
>   - in some cases, hack the stem #'length-fraction so
>     that the beam from the lower voice clears the
> higher.
> Doing this for the measure above, we get
>
>   <<
>     \relative c' {
>       \override Stem #'transparent = ##t
>       \override Beam #'transparent = ##t
>       \override NoteColumn #'ignore-
> collision = ##t
>       <e-2 a-3 c-1>8
>       \override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
>       <e a c>
>       \revert NoteHead #'style
>       <e a c>
>       \override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
>       <e a c>
>
>       \revert NoteHead #'style
>       <e a c>
>       \override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
>       <e a c>
>       \revert NoteHead #'style
>       <e a c>
>       \override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
>       <e a c>
>       \revert NoteHead #'style
>     } \\
>     \relative c' {
>       \stemUp
>       <a-0 e''-0>8
>      
>     }
>   >>
>

> This is somewhat labor-intensive, and annoying to read
> (although it can be mitigated a bit with macros).  But the
> real problems have only just begun.  Now that it's been split
> into two voices, everything you add to the staff begins to
> have layout issues.  Take a look at the fingerings in the two
> measures above.  In the one-voice version, the fingerings
> line up nicely, with three above the staff and two below.
> In the two-voice version, most of the fingerings overlap
> with other entities, rendering them unreadable.
>
> You'll run into the same kinds of issues with every kind of
> annotation, from string numbers and right hand fingerings
> through accent marks and TextSpanners.  The hack to
> split the chords into multiple voices wreaks havoc with
> the layout engine as we add more information to the staff.
>
> We could fix this problem by adding another special-case
> similar to \harmonic for cross-noteheads.  But I have a
> sneaking feeling it wouldn't be the last such special case.
>
> It seems like a better solution would be to provide syntax
> support for overriding individual noteheads within a chord
> to be arbitrary glyphs or stencils -- whatever you can do
> with noteheads outside of chords, basically.
>
> But I'd take the hack, for now!  I'm transcribing a piece
> that has many of these partly-damped chords, and I'd love
> to have a way to annotate them properly.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -steve
>
> p.s. Thank you for this awesome system, by the way.
>