I’m a 68 year-old retired GP. I took up guitar aged 15, playing folk and rock stuff by ear, although I had learned piano long enough in primary school to know what a staff looked like, and I played in folk clubs and bands until medicine took over.
After a long career break(!), I took up guitar again when I retired, and went through a part-time jazz course at St Andrews University. Local musicians I play with tend to use Band-in-a-Box for lead-sheets, but this didn’t work for the course’s solo transcriptions, and essays which required notation mixed in with the text. I tried Sibelius, but was frustrated by the lack of transparency in what it did (a simple modification tended to have hard-to-eradicate side-effects), and I discovered LilyPond. Having a hobbyist interest in electronics, I encountered microprocessors in the 1970s, and built a couple of kit computers in the late seventies and early eighties, acquiring some programming experience in hand-assembly, assembler, BASIC and Pascal in the eighties, and with C in the nineties. My requirements of Lilypond are minimal in comparison to the professionals on the list, and such challenges as I’ve put to the list appear to have been solved within minutes by the experts! As a poor reader, I’m grateful for the MIDI facility which helps me proof-read my puny and time-consuming efforts at transcription. It strikes me that Lilypond appeals to programmers who do a bit of music and musicians who do a bit of programming - I’ve struggled to “sell” it to musicians who aren’t into programming. Michael _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
