Hi, wow, many more emails arrived! Let me send my thoughts written in the meantime, and go back offline for a few hours.
i've found a reason why i could support "reversed" tuplet ratio: if we decide to allow arbitrary integer durations (so that a3 would mean a third of the whole note), it would make more sense to have { a3 b6 } equivalent to \tuplet 3/2 { a2 b4 } rather than have it equivalent to \tuplet 2/3 { a2 b4 }. In other words, in LilyPond we express duration using the /denominator/ of the fraction, so it makes sense to multiply duration 2 (half note) by 3/2 to get duration 3 (a triplet). Do you see what i mean? However, if we reverse the argument in \tuplet, we definitely should deprecate \times. Having both \times 2/3 and \tuplet 3/2 for specifying triplets would be *very* confusing. I agree that specifying not just x/y ratio but also x/y "of what?" is a good idea. I don't have any idea on how the actual syntax might look like, though. As for transposing clefs, i play guitar a bit myself, and i have once typeset a piece using both G and G_8 clefs. Maybe it was a bad idea, but for me it was perfectly fine. On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 1:16 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakel...@webdrake.net> wrote: > If you _did_ insist on the distinction between those clefs being important, > it would be very problematic because then as a guitarist (or piccolist, or > bass player, or conductor) you'd have to spend lots of time worrying about > whether the omission of that "8" on the clef actually meant something or was > just a typo. Whereas as things are, you can just ignore it. > > Now think about extending that to other transposing instruments. Should a > bass clarinet be notated in \treble sounding a 12th below what is written, > or in \treble_8 sounding a 2nd below? Isn't the important thing (as player > or conductor) that you never have to worry about it? It seems that our opinions on this subject are totally opposite. While i definitely agree that the important thing is that performers don't have to worry about this issue, in my opinion the *only* way to ensure this is to state clef transpositions explicitely. After all, it doesn't cost you anything to write them. For me, what we currently have is a holly mess. There are some areas where ambiguity can be your goal, but i don't see how it could be here. In my opinion it is *infinitely* better to write down the information than to leave it to the performer to guess it based on tradition. For example, despite the fact that i'm an amateur musician (guitar & voice), i had learned note names quickly. However, for *many years* i had no idea that some instruments are transposed. Had i tried to play a transposed instrument, i would play exactly what was written. When i learned that some instruments are transposed *and that the transposition isn't marked in the notation*, i felt it was outrageous. I still believe it was a foolish idea to start notating transposing instruments in this way, i.e. without any indication next to the clef (no idea who started it, though :P). For example, the horn transposition can be either a fourth or a fifth. For me this is nonsense: you want to play from some old score, but you have to ask a musicologist to be sure what the notes actually are :( I hope that this email hadn't become too sarcastic or disparaging :/ On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 1:16 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakel...@webdrake.net> wrote: > Don't know about you, but I find they always seem to be most tempting to > write whenever I have something else really important (work, study, > planning, big life change ...) upcoming that I should really be > concentrating on :-P true :P but my conscience is clean this time, as i wrote this email when commuting, without internet access :) cheers, Janek _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel