Re: Tuplets across barlines?

[Trevor Bača]

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 6:44 PM, Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Joey,

> Anyone know if it is possible in lilypond to notation tuplets across a barline?

Sure!

\version "2.15.3"
\relative c' { \times 2/3 { c1 d e } }

> I'm looking into the more contemporary features l
> ilypond provides and am trying to find most of the
> pitfalls before I dedicate my time to learning the language.

It's worth it.

+1

Just guessing here, but other rhythmic affordances of LilyPond that Joey might be interested in:

* using \remove Forbid_line_break_engraver to allow barline-crossing note values (à la mensurstriche transcriptions of medieval polyphony)

* using \set tupletFullLength = ##t to cause tuplet brackets to outline the exact amount of horizontal whitespace allocated to the notes, rests and chords they contain

* using [ and ] to specify the start- and stop-points of beams exactly

* using \set stemLeftBeamCount = #p, \set stemRightBeamCount = #q to nest beams to to arbitrary levels of containment

In short, LilyPond's time-keeping system is something of a miracle. Why? Because all of these things (and many others besides) work *semantically*. Compare this with layers of kludge necessary to make barline-crossing durations work in Finale or Sibelius.

FWIW I've always suspected that the reason that LilyPond gets the western time-keeping model right where Finale / Sibelius struggle has to do with the concept of the measure: the object models of both Finale and Sibelius seem *to start at the measure* (and then work down to tuplets, notes, rests and chords and then work up to voices, staves and scores). But in LilyPond this isn't the case: the concept of the measure is much less central to the way that users work with LilyPond and the out-of-the-box correctness of these more bizarre elements of the rhythmic system would seem to be a happy byproduct of that.

Trevor.

  

--
Trevor Bača
address@hidden