Hi. I'm new to the mailing list and pretty new to Lilypond, as well. First off I'd like to say a big "thanks" to the developers of Lilypond. This is an amazing engraver! I've been using Finale since about 1999 or so, and have just started trying Lilypond in earnest in the last month or so. I tried it cursorily last fall when I first got a laptop and installed Ubuntu on it, but I found the lack of a graphical interface too daunting and just gave up. Lately I've made an honest effort to learn it and I'm really impressed by its powerful capabilities and beautiful output. And really, the learning curve for Lilypond is no steeper than it was for me learning Finale. When I learned Finale98 it was a big pain.
So anyway, I was writing to make a suggestion regarding sections 7.1.1-2 of the user's manual, the ones on staff changes in piano music. In my latest engraving project, a solo piano work of mine, I was faced with doing cross-staff notes and beaming in the very first measure (see attached image) and I looked all through the manual trying to find the section that showed how to do this (in Finale it's called "cross-staff beaming," and I was looking for something similar in the manual). Only after much searching and thinking did it occur to me that I might be able simply to enter the notes using the \change Staff function and the beams would take care of themselves. (Since the examples given in the manual used quarter notes, they of course wouldn't need beams.) I set up the staves called "up" and "down," then entered a series of 16th notes alternating from one staff to the other as shown in 7.1.2 (manual staff switches). To my amazement, it created perfect beams. It seems like in Finale you have to use three different tools to do this. Nice! My suggestion is this: in section 7.1.1 and/or 7.1.2 of the manual, about staff switching, add a sentence or two plus a simple example showing how the beams are handled automatically if you enter notes that require beaming (i.e. 8ths or shorter). Anyone coming from Finale will be looking for "cross-staff beaming" instead of staff switching. If I had seen an example of notes switching staves, beamed together like that, I would have known immediately that that was what I was looking for. Also, it would be nice to have a brief explanation of the "\skip 1 * 10" command that's given in the example code in 7.1.2. I didn't know what that was for but typed it in anyway and saw that it created a bunch of empty measures. I tried substituting a few "s2." (dotted half-note spacers) to see if they'd work the same as the \skip thing, and they did. Maybe the explanation could mention that \skip performs the same function as s1 s2 and so forth. Now, when I did my staff switching, I didn't really know where to put the \context Staff and \new Voice stuff that's shown in the example in 7.1.2, so I just left that part out--it worked just fine without it. What do those things do if they're included? I'm glad it worked without them because I'm still very confused by contexts and voices. I can't get my MIDI block in the right place to generate a MIDI file either! Haha! Finally an observation, which is that Lilypond handles cross-staff beaming much more smoothly than Finale does. I'm finding that there are many things for which Lilypond is more adept than Finale, and it's really fun learning this. There's something magical about the way it takes a text file and churns out a lovely musical engraving. I've shown some of these things to my students and they can hardly believe it, although I doubt any of them will start using Lilypond because they seem pretty scare of the code when I showed them that. Anyway kudos to the Lilypond developers. It's a great tool! All best, Jon Kulp -- Jonathan Kulp, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Music History and Theory UL Lafayette School of Music P. O. Box 41207 Lafayette, LA 70504-1207 Office phone: (337) 482-5203 http://www.jonathankulp.com
%% Generated by lilypond-book
%% Options: [fragment,alt=[image of music],ragged-right,indent=0\mm]
\include "lilypond-book-preamble.ly"
% ****************************************************************
% Start cut-&-pastable-section
% ****************************************************************
\paper {
#(define dump-extents #t)
ragged-right = ##t
indent = 0\mm
force-assignment = #""
line-width = #(- line-width (* mm 3.000000))
}
\layout {
}
{
% ****************************************************************
% ly snippet contents follows:
% ****************************************************************
\sourcefileline 9
{
\new PianoStaff <<
\new Staff = "up" \relative c'' {
\time 6/8
% begin inserting notes here
\once \override TextScript #'padding = #1
<e e'>16^\markup { \center-align { \bold { " Presto" } } }
% m. 1
\change Staff = down <dis dis'> \change Staff = up <e e'>
% m. 1
\change Staff = down <dis dis'> \change Staff = up <e e'>
% m. 1
\change Staff = down <dis dis'> \change Staff = up <e e'>8
% m. 1
\change Staff = down <bes bes'> \change Staff = up <f f'>
% m. 1
<e e'>16[ \change Staff = down <dis dis'> \change Staff = up <e e'>
% m. 2
\change Staff = down <dis dis'> \change Staff = up <e e'>
% m. 2
\change Staff = down <dis dis'>] \change Staff = up <e e'>8
% m. 2
\change Staff = down <bes bes'> \change Staff = up <f f'>
% m. 2
es'2.-> ~ | % m. 3
}
\new Staff = "down" \relative c {
\override DynamicLineSpanner #'staff-padding = #3
s2.^\ff s2. % mm. 1-2 spacers so upper voice can
cross over to this staff
\clef bass
e,!8( b'-.) ais-. f'-. e?-. ais,-. % m. 3
}
>>
}
% ****************************************************************
% end ly snippet
% ****************************************************************
}
<<attachment: lily-f44bea0637.png>>
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