Re: lilypond duet writing

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 24.04.2017 um 03:35 schrieb Margaret Voorhaar:
>> Hi Hans, 
>> Thank-you very much for responding to my first efforts at learning Lilypond. 
>>
>> I am going to take advantage of your kindness and submit my next
>> conundrum to you.
>>
>> I have written a flute melody which is is complete at 32 bars in
>> length. Is it too late to integrate a second flute part beneath
>> this?
>
> No, not at all.  It is one of the beauties of text-based work that you
> will very rarely run into such a situation. While in a graphical
> program adding something "after the fact" may indeed break things, in
> a text based program the whole text is considered newly upon each
> compilation.

Well, "considered new" is not the fundamental difference: a graphical
program will consider its input "new" on each load.  Graphical programs
offer a number of transformations you can do to your project and any
work you need to do have to be matched to what the program can do.

With a text-based program, you have access to the "meat" of the matter
independently.  If there is no sensible _structural_ transformation you
can do to your project, you can still strip all the meat (the notes) off
the bones of an existing project and put them on a different skeleton.
So if you want to have a giraffe and all you have is an elephant, you
just need a giraffe skeleton (which is comparably lightweight) and you
can hang all the elephant meat off that skeleton and are finished.
Don't ask me what to do the with the trunk, though.

So the bulk of work you already invested rarely goes to waste.  The
downside, of course, is that it is easy to create invalid input,
something that graphical programs usually only do due to bugs.  But
recovery is often straightforward, and you can continue working on your
material even while it is in invalid state and you are waiting for help
to fix that.

Like the help from Urs.

-- 
David Kastrup