Re: Best practice when typesetting transposing instruments.

[James Lowe]

This will depend on who else is seeing the music.

For example I transpose a lot of music for the conductor of my orchestra 
(as some of us can't do it in our heads that easily), but I always set 
it in the original (i.e. if the conductor has it in A on their score I 
set it in A). That way if there any mistakes made I can always go back 
to the original rather than have to work out the mistakes to fix.

It also allows for a lot more flexibility for any other instruments who 
may take the parts - we don't have a full complement of instruments so 
for those instruments we don't have we spread them around others that 
may not necessarily be in the same key.

I then set up duplicate lines in my \score {..} and simply comment out 
the transposition I don't want.

Also, because it helps me, I actually use \transpose c c { \music } so 
that when I have a long list

\score {
  <<
    %\transpose c c { \music }
    \transpose a bes { \music }
    %\transpose a ees { \music }
    %\transpose a d { \music }
  >>
}


and so on. I use the >> as I also add first and second parts at the same 
time and depending if the requirement is to have two staves or a single one.

It's easy to see which line gives me the original key when I am flicking 
between the two for checking.

One other tip though, after typesetting a long piece and fiddling about 
with line breaks and positioning the fermatas/rehearsal marks and so on, 
when you transpose, the position of the staves can change dramatically 
(especially if you move from say, f major in A to a B flat instrument 
when yuo suddenly get 4 sharps - this will add lots of accidentals and 
also the 4 sharps take more room at the beginning of each line than 1 
flat does - and this can really mess things up.

So I would not bother tweaking too much if you are finally going to 
transpose in one key and it changes things.

James


Kirill wrote:
> Hi LilyPond Gurus,
>
> I cannot quite find figure out from the manual which is a better practice when
> typesetting transposing instruments (say, a B\flat clarinet):
>
> 1) Specifying \transposition bes { ... } and then writing out the
> transposed part. Or
> 2) Using \transpose bes, c {\transposition bes ...} and notating in C?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
>
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