Re: Lilypond and Jazz chords

[Tim McNamara]

On Jun 2, 2009, at 4:55 AM, Jean-Alexis Montignies wrote:

> Hi there, as a jazz player I would like to share my input.
>
> What I need in scores is really chord names.
> The chord name denotes the intent of the composer and is much  
> subject to interpretation.
>
> Some examples:
> If you have a dominant chord, you write G7. Most of the time, the  
> pianist will not play the 5th and depending on the context will  
> play a 9th or a flattened 9th.
> If you write G7b9, it just means that if you play a 9th, you should  
> play a flattened one (probably the melody have a flattened 9th).
> In the real book, most 7b5 chords should really be written 7#11,  
> but this is another story.
> I found a score where a chord was named 'phrygian'.
>
> The problem I ran when i wrote chords in Lilypond:
>
> 1) I had some difficulties to write the Alt chords (for me it's  
> based on the superlocrian scale 1 2- 2+ 3 4+ 6- (or 5+) 7-)   
> because the scale has two seconds. (Note that the diminished scale  
> cannot be written for now with the chord notation, if you ever want  
> to write a 8 note chord ;) ).
> 2) There no way to write N.C. : no chord (wouldn't the use of R, r  
> and s make sense in the chord mode?)



The plan per Carl or someone is to add a N.C. function to the  
chordmode using r as the input; it will be folded into 2.13 IIRC.

This can currently be done with a workaround provided to me by a very  
generous list member:

\version "2.12.2"

% Whiteout hide the chordname
NCString  = { <c e g>-\markup { \whiteout { \hspace #-2 " N.C.    " }}}
ChrdExcep = #(append (sequential-music-to-chord-exceptions NCString #t)
           ignatzekExceptions)

% Example
% {<<
% {
% \chords {
%  a2:m7 d2:7.9-
%  g2:m7 c2:7
%  \set   chordNameExceptions = #ChrdExcep c1 %chord <c e g> as NCString
%  \unset chordNameExceptions
%  a2:m7 d2:7.9-
%       }
% }
 % \relative c' {  a'2 d2 g,2 c2 c4 c4 c4 c4  a2 }
% >>
% }