On 01/08/2013 03:19 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> in which the trumpets just play a few rhythms and half of a melody (not
> even the whole phrase!!), and the strings just ... string the thing
> along. :P

Get rid of the strings and replace them with a brass band.  :)

> blockheaded enough to write notes for the contrabass that are below
> their range -- those notes will have to be played by the bassoon
> instead.)

Are you using Rosegarden's built in arranging encyclopedia?  If you use 
the "Create segments with" properties ahead of time, before creating the 
segments, you can use the Load button to dial up just about any kind of 
instrument you can think of, and Rosegarden will pick the right clef, 
transposition, and indicate when notes are out of the expected playable 
range for that instrument by drawing them in red.  (How accurate that is 
depends on the instrument to a large extent.  Some are more flexible 
than others.  The defaults are reasonable and sound in every case where 
I have any personal knowledge of that instrument though.)

It's kind of an obscure feature that's probably hard to discover and 
understand without reading documentation, and the documentation probably 
isn't any good either, but it has a lot of potential to help composers 
avoid doing dumb things like that.  When you work with MIDI, it's way 
too easy to tell a flute to play a low Bb or something, and the synth 
will happily obey while the human player will call you a moron.

> (Oh, and lest you think the bassoon has it bad... the oboes play a
> beautiful melody of silence the whole way through. Haha... yeah, my
> orchestration needs work. Lots of work.)

Mine does too, because I feel too sorry for the "tone color" 
instruments, and I tend to try to make sure everybody has some fun, at 
the expense of artistic purity or whatever.

Bassoon and tuba solos anyone?

Everybody gets fair treatment, except the TROMBONES.  When it comes to 
trombones, silence is golden.  :P


> Speaking of which, does lilypond support automatically indicating which
> instruments are on which staves when empty staves are omitted?

Indeed, I was thinking the same thing myself.

That turned out to be an interesting research project.

Yes, LilyPond supports two staff properties, instrumentName and 
shortInstrumentName.  The latter is used on all follow-up staves.

As you point out, we only use the former.  Thinking about that from a 
code perspective, the reason for that is fairly obvious.  Just what 
should be do, algorithmically, to derive a short name?

I can think of two approaches off the top of my head.

1) Just take the first letter from whatever the label is.  I have a 
vague and NOT researched memory of seeing conductor scores that had 
single letters on subsequent staffs.  Trombone and Timpani and Tenor 
would all come out as a T.  In most cases, grouping and placement would 
probably still give you enough of a clue to find the trees in the forest.

2) Implement a whole parallel properties system allowing you to edit the 
track label AND the secondary label.  This is clearly the most flexible, 
since you could manually specify "Tbn." and "Tpni." and "Tnr" or 
whatever, and get it to come out exactly how you want.  It's also more 
work to develop, since it requires going in and adding a lot of parallel 
infrastructure stuff, new properties, and so on.  It's also more work to 
use, since you have to go edit all of these things manually to get any 
result.

My take on it, approach 1 isn't very satisfying, but I can probably have 
it implemented in five minutes.  Approach 2 is probably what we need.

What think ye?  Business is dead and I have a free night off, and 
nothing in particular to do.  Prime time for me actually knocking 
something together again.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre

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