Re: Snippet: Tie does not appear

[James Harkins]

At Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:42:01 +1000,
Nick Payne wrote:
> You can't have a tie between notes in different voices. Re-arrange the voices 
> to have the notes in
> the same voice (or alternatively, create an extra voice with hidden notes 
> that has the tie).

This may not always be possible.

> And
> BTW, it's normally easier to enter notes using relative mode, where the pitch 
> of each note is
> relative to the preceding note

"Normally," sure, but...

I'm working on a piece now for sheng, a Chinese instrument related to the free 
reed mouth organ /khaen/ common in Laos and Northeast Thailand. Like the guitar 
in the original example here, it's polyphonic (within fingering limitations) 
and most often notated on one staff. That means a lot of use of layers, and 
ties/slurs can get tricky. Since I'm just starting out with lilypond, I haven't 
developed that sixth sense to look at some complex notation and know 
immediately the best way to divide up the notes among layers. So I have to do a 
lot of moving notes between layers, preview, "no, that doesn't look right," 
etc., and with every iteration, the octaves always got screwed up using 
relative mode.

The original example is "modernist"ic in the use of a lot of wide intervals. 
The benefit of relative mode is to avoid writing , or ' on every note, but if 
the style features a lot of intervals greater than a fourth, then that benefit 
disappears and absolute mode starts to look more attractive. My gut feeling is, 
if I will have to look at a lot of ,, and '' in either mode, then I would 
rather know that ,, *always* means exactly one specific octave... (admitting 
that all of this is a matter of taste).

So for this piece, I'll use absolute mode pretty much throughout. But if my 
next piece uses more monophonic instruments and a less angular style, then yes, 
relative mode is a breeze in that case.

(Another +1 for Frescobaldi -- "convert to relative" and "convert to absolute.")

James


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James Harkins /// dewdrop world
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