Re: Music Formatting Help

[Douglas A Linhardt]

Kevin,

I am trying to work with handbells also.  I just got involved with lilypond
recently, and I'm having some of the same issues you have already run into.  I
am planning on doing some development (probably this weekend) to provide _some_
of the functionality that you want.

My comments are interspersed below.

Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> > Re: Music Formatting Help
> > From: Mats Bengtsson
> > Subject: Re: Music Formatting Help
> > Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 16:04:21 +0100
> > User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
> >
> Kevin DeHoff wrote:
> >
> > I am trying to arrange a piece for handbells, and have run into some serious
> > formatting issues in terms of exactly where things have to go. I was
> > wondering if anyone could give me a hand in figuring out whether the
> > following was even possible in lilypond, and if it is, setting it up.
> >
> > 1) (Most important) Any given voice has to be able to automatically split
> > staves, with *any* middle C or below being in the bass clef, and *anything*
> > above being in the treble, even if it splits chords across the staff.
> See
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.0/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Automatic-staff-changes.html#Automatic%20staff%20changes
> However, it will not split chords that are input as chords such
> as <c e g>4 but you may use simultaneous voices instead,
> << c \\ e \\ g >>.

I'm not sure that Mats quite grasped everything you are looking for.  The thing
that he missed is that *ALL* middle Cs be in the bass clef.  I have found the
place in the code to fix this, and I plan on fixing it this weekend.  Basically,
we need to tune the autochange function to be able to switch middle C, even when
the voice has notes in the treble clef on either side of it.  This should be
pretty easy.

I ran into the same problem with the chords not being split across staves, but I
haven't tried  the multi-voice solution.  My concern would be that, in the
example above, C would be in the bass clef, and e would be stem down treble, and
g would be stem up treble.  And with transposing, who knows.

> >
> > 2) The above property should be applicable to transposed music, no matter
> > what key it is transposed to (i.e. they can't be manual staff switches).
>
> I'm not sure how the above works with transposed music, try and see.
>

If we can get lilypond to split chords across staves automatically without
screwing up the stemming, this problem goes away.  I want to tackle the
auto-split problem, too, but it's further down my list.

>
> 3) Any time a voice switches staffs, it has to be noted (all staff switches
> need to be followed)
>
> Do you mean like
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.0/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Staff-switch-lines.html#Staff%20switch%20lines

I haven't run into any problems with following the voice across staves using
this construct.

> >
> > 4) I would need a chart at the very beginning of the music to indicate all
> > the bells used. This would be a single line, bass and treble clef staves,
> > whole notes with no bar lines, and a forced line break at the end.
>
> As someone pointed out earlier, the current support for ambitus
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.0/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Ambitus.html#Ambitus
> is probably a very good starting point for such a feature. However,
> some coding has to be done.
>
> /Mats

This is something else I wanted to look at, but I didn't know where.  Maybe I'll
 look into it now and get some ideas.

I'll let you know (and submit to lilypond_devel) when I have something to play 
with.