Re: Sibelius user looking for the easiest way to learn LilyPond

[Olivier Biot]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:59 PM, Shane Brandes <address@hidden> wrote:

To give you a reverse opinion. Lilypond at a basic level is fairly
easy to understand especially if you use a program like Frescobaldi to
help you construct the scores with their various parts.

This is my experience as well. Writing the music and articulations is pretty straightforward one you get the logic. Slurring may look counter-intuitive but it makes sense: to add a slur between b and c & d, you would write "b ( c d )" and not "(b c d)" as the "(" means "starting from the last note, start a slur up to and including the note before ")". A similar logic holds for manual beaming. Writing music in relative mode is easy as well - if the distance to the note is less than a fifth, then you don't need to add a "'" or "," octave changing mark.

 

That initially
was to me the greatest challenge. With Frescobaldi you can build
scores and then from there learn how the syntax works. Additionally
with such an external editor it will point out syntax errors which is
really handy even if you have a great understanding of Lilypond it can
be a chore to find a simple small syntax error in a plain text file.
Doable certainly fun no. So as far as simply getting up and running it
should not take to terribly long.

I agree. Frescobaldi has another advantage: it supports built-in syntax highlighting and you can click on error messages and will be brought to the offending bit in the offending file. You can also click on a note in the PDF preview to go to the source file where that note was defined (e.g., to correct an octave error). And ifg you create MIDI output you can even play back the MIDI from within Frescobaldi (if you added a "\midi{}" construct in your "\score" block.
 

Of course it is when you want
Lilypond to do things that are either nonstandard practice or not yet
resolved in terms of what the program is capable of automagically that
is when it can be a bit of a bear and you must begin to really think
about how to get around odd things.

This is absolutely true. The main difficulty is that LilyPond makes use of Scheme, which is a programming language that is not seen very frequently and has its own logic. I'm a software engineer and even I have difficulties understanding Scheme as I never was taught Scheme so far - I need to learn it on-the-fly, along with the LilyPond code and a lot of useful snippets you can find via your preferred search engine.

For example I would like to make a
trill line go for a measure or so without the obligatory Tr. showing
up at the beginning. You think oh that should be easy. Let's turn off
the Trill part. After searching the user manual and wading through the
lilypond snippet repository (if you have not seen this yet it is an
selection of useful code that does not need to clutter up the user
manual) you discover there is no easy way. So you think to yourself
well the trill line is made by a widget called a spanner maybe I can
redefine a spanner to do what you want so you go looking at the bits
of the manual that talk about lines and you then find a way to
redefine a dynamic spanner as a line and voila you realize you can
tell it what sort of line to be and after a bit you have a trill
marking senza the Tr. and the best part is in that process you learn
all manner of other odd things that are possible that you might not
need at the moment. Of course there maybe even other ways of cracking
such a problem.

There's not one way only that leads to Rome, as one says :-)

One you start touching the internals of LilyPond, you get exposed to a completely new universe where virtually everything is possible.

 

And on top of that the people that hang about this
list are generally very good about giving suggestions and pointing
people in the right direction.

That is absolutely true!

Best regards,

Olivier