Re: Making overlapping grace notes

[David Kastrup]

Andrew Bernard <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Maite,
>
> Good suggestion. This is in fact exactly what I have been doing until
> now - including using the terrific slash function, thanks
> Ponderers!. But for some reason in my massively complex score which
> depends heavily on proportional notation, the beaming in this bar, at
> least under 2.19.25, goes askew, with the last note coming before the
> second last note. I think it would be difficult to post this issue to
> the list as there is no sensible minimal example I can generate that
> makes it happen, and it is inappropriate to post several thousand
> lines of code. [A standalone extract does not show the problem.]
>
> Now I have been doing all sorts of non-standard, half-baked hacks to
> get grace notes as I require them, and eventually ran into so many
> difficulties that I decided to rework the lot. In a communication to
> me Mr Kastrup pointed out the foolishness of trying to do an ‘end-run’
> around lilypond to get things like this working. I must say this is
> very wise advice indeed, and I have since returned to a much more
> straight and orthodox use of grace notes in the score, and stopped
> using all the fake ‘little notes’ and so on. In fact, everything looks
> much more smooth and beautiful now.
>
> So now that I am back into using proper lilypond grace notes, I hit
> this issue. Will continue to investigate.

Well, grace notes fundamentally come before the notes they apply to.
I still would consider it sanest to input them in the normal way but
then run your own music function over the score which will replace all
occurences of grace music with music parallel to the following music.

Which is really, really, really involved and somewhat problematic as, in
order to get the parallel overlap working, you need to grab music
material until coming to something with a non-zero duration.

I don't actually understand how "proportional notation" makes sense with
the grace notes overlapping the actual note as that would rather
indicate simultaneous play.

The next best possibility is to redefine \grace, \acciaccatura and so on
so that they take the next music expression (which you can make sure
manually includes the overlapping note, like
\grace { ... } { \override ... c2 }) and combine with that, in a similar
manner as \afterGrace does it.  That requires only some massaging of
your source code (most of the time you'll not need extra braces) and
will still be compilable without the special style/definition.

-- 
David Kastrup