Hello,
In flamenco and bossa-nova guitar music it is quite
common to damp some (but not all) strings with the
left hand while strumming. The standard notation for
this is to have cross-noteheads on the damped strings
and normal noteheads on the strings that should ring.
Lilypond makes it extremely tedious to deal with this
relatively common situation. It's easy to have the entire
chord drawn with x-noteheads, but much more difficult
to get only some of the notes to have x-noteheads.
For instance, let's say we're notating the strumming of
eighth-note open A-minor chords, like so:
\relative c' {
<a-0 e'-2 a-3 c-1 e-0>8
<a e' a c e>
<a e' a c e>
<a e' a c e>
<a e' a c e>
<a e' a c e>
<a e' a c e>
<a e' a c e>
}
So far the music only needs one voice, and it prints in
an easy-to-read (for guitarists) stacked notation, with one
stem per chord.
But let's say we want every other chord to be partly
damped: strings 2, 3 and 4 have x-noteheads, and
strings 1 and 5 have normal noteheads. We don't want
any other visible changes to the print representation --
in particular, this is not polyphonic music, so we don't
want up- and down- stems in the same measure, nor
notes from any given chord to be horizontally shifted.
We just want every other chord to have its middle three
noteheads be crosses.
The only way to accomplish this, as far as I can tell,
requires many manual steps for each measure:
- split the music expression into two voices
- copy the chords into the second voice
- delete all the normal-notehead notes from one voice
- delete the cross-notehead notes from the other voice
- make the stems and beams in the top voice invisible
- turn off note-column collision warnings
- in some cases, hack the stem #'length-fraction so
that the beam from the lower voice clears the higher.
Doing this for the measure above, we get
<<
\relative c' {
\override Stem #'transparent = ##t
\override Beam #'transparent = ##t
\override NoteColumn #'ignore-collision = ##t
<e-2 a-3 c-1>8
\override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
<e a c>
\revert NoteHead #'style
<e a c>
\override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
<e a c>
\revert NoteHead #'style
<e a c>
\override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
<e a c>
\revert NoteHead #'style
<e a c>
\override NoteHead #'style = #'cross
<e a c>
\revert NoteHead #'style
} \\
\relative c' {
\stemUp
<a-0 e''-0>8 <a e''> <a e''> <a e''>
<a e''> <a e''> <a e''> <a e''>
}
>>
This is somewhat labor-intensive, and annoying to read
(although it can be mitigated a bit with macros). But the
real problems have only just begun. Now that it's been split
into two voices, everything you add to the staff begins to
have layout issues. Take a look at the fingerings in the two
measures above. In the one-voice version, the fingerings
line up nicely, with three above the staff and two below.
In the two-voice version, most of the fingerings overlap
with other entities, rendering them unreadable.
You'll run into the same kinds of issues with every kind of
annotation, from string numbers and right hand fingerings
through accent marks and TextSpanners. The hack to
split the chords into multiple voices wreaks havoc with
the layout engine as we add more information to the staff.
We could fix this problem by adding another special-case
similar to \harmonic for cross-noteheads. But I have a
sneaking feeling it wouldn't be the last such special case.
It seems like a better solution would be to provide syntax
support for overriding individual noteheads within a chord
to be arbitrary glyphs or stencils -- whatever you can do
with noteheads outside of chords, basically.
But I'd take the hack, for now! I'm transcribing a piece
that has many of these partly-damped chords, and I'd love
to have a way to annotate them properly.
Thanks,
-steve
p.s. Thank you for this awesome system, by the way.
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