Re: alternate notes within a part

[Aaron Hill]

On 2022-01-09 2:50 pm, Valentin Petzel wrote:
> It depends a bit on how structured your music is. If you’ve got two 
> Voices it
> is reasonable to give both their own relative clause.
>
> If you music does not have a lot of complex structure a top level 
> relative is
> very much find. Problematic are cases where notes within the music 
> might
> change, thus affecting stuff after it. This might be the case with 
> tags, but
> also with cues or scores in footnotes (where also someone might think 
> about
> adding something, and suddenly the main music body has problems.

Having been bitten more times than worth counting, I have almost 
exclusively moved to using \fixed.  The level of consistent and precise 
control means I can add, change, or remove notes as well as freely copy 
and paste music around without fear of notes being thrown off into the 
wrong octave.

That said, I think \relative is still useful as a tool for 
reasonably-scoped melodic phrases where there is much less chance for 
things to go awry.  So, if a song had, say, three main sections, I would 
probably use one \relative per, decoupling the sections from each other. 
 (Also, there is a good chance each section ends up as its own variable 
anyway.)  Going more granular might make sense if a section was 
particularly long.  At that point, the early and later notes just stop 
having any practical relationship with one another, so they might be 
better placed in their own blocks.


-- Aaron Hill