Re:Unusual repeat/chorus structure (Richard Shann)

[Don Gingrich]

Richard Shann wrote:
> I occurred to me when I saw this that you almost certainly spent more
> time trying to convert from your original than creating afresh with
> Denemo. Attached is my re-setting of your piece using Denemo. It took
> 16mins 12 seconds to create this with Denemo (I had your lyrics
> ready-prepared to paste in so that save some time). I can't imagine you
> would spend less time cleaning up and import of MusicXML (a hopelessly
> ambiguous, rag-tag format).
> OTOH Denemo does generate a certain amount of general-purpose crud,
> below is a version with it edited out somewhat.
> Two things - I've used the generic repeat stuff here, rather than the
> nicer-to-read \repeat ...\alternative ... stuff.
> And I've made the repeat structure follow the typesetting norms - whole
> measure rests and repeat with upbeat.

I actually use Frescobaldi, and it's taken a while to come up
to speed. I'd need a good reason for another interface.

Eventually, between the snippet:
"Volta text markup using repeatCommands"

and your example I got there.

I eventually used:
voltaText = \markup { 1. 3. 5. } before the notes block

  \set Score.repeatCommands = #(list (list 'volta voltaText )
  r2.
  \set Score.repeatCommands = #'((volta #f) (volta "2. 4.") end-repeat)
  r2. | % 31
 % several bars deleted for brevity
  g4 r2 | % 44
  \set Score.repeatCommands = #'((volta #f))
  \bar "|."

The problem that I missed, which I will mention as a trap for newbies
such as myself, was that xml2ly does some truly *evil* things with importing
the chord information. This interacts in weird and wonderful ways with
the melody information.

Typically when I encode chords it looks like:

TuneChords =  \chordmode {  
  s8  g2.*4 c1 d8*15 g8*27 c8*10 d2.*2 c g2. b e4*8:m a8*7
  d8*19 e2.*2:m d e:m d  e:m  d g2.*2
}

with

\context ChordNames = "PartPOneVoiceOneChords" \TuneChords

in the score block.

I'm probably not doing this optimally, but I get results that I can 
live with.

The XML import chords use the s code a lot and often have multiple
repeat volte -- I generally just delete the chords and start again.

You're right about the XML being messy, but I had a bunch of tunes
already in MuseScore and I find that it mostly saves time to import
rather than starting from scratch. The MuseScore version of this
tune (Bojangles) was not completely correct, so I was behind from the
start.

Thanks for your assistance,

-Don
-- 
Don Gingrich