Re: LilyPond, Finale and Sibelius (was Review of Valentin's Opera)

[Valentin Villenave]

2009/4/3 Jonathan Kulp <address@hidden>:
> What's nice about Lilypond from my "composer's" point of view is that it's
> gotten me back to writing music with pencil and paper instead of doing it in
> Finale.  I've realized for a while that in some pieces Finale was making me
> lazy as a composer (and the same happens with my students).  I was using the
> copy-and-paste function way too much and not thinking enough about the
> content of the music.  With Lilypond I'm again separating composition from
> typesetting, which is a good thing IMO. Last semester I bought a book of
> staff paper for the first time in more than 15 years!

Absolutely, I can say the same thing for me (except that I bought a
laser printer instead of staff paper) :-)

Writing with pencil/paper really feels nice, and then when you have a
written model, typesetting can go very fast. (I can easily typeset 5
minutes of dense orchestral music a day).

2009/4/3 David Stocker <address@hidden>:
> Notice that I don't write out each repeated chord in the manuscript. It's
> understood by the editors and engravers that the "|" means simply "print the
> previous chord again". It would be great if there was a shorthand for this
> in LilyPond code for situations (like in many forms of popular music) an
> accompaniment pattern consists of many repeated chords--perhaps something
> like "<r>"--simply instructing LilyPond to reprint the previous chord. It
> would be doubly useful if the command were sensitive enough to allow the
> user to specify things like different rhythms or whether the chord is tied
> or has different articulations attached to it, etc. on the repeated chords
> (as in <c e g>4 <r>2. ~ <r>1 ).

I can certainly agree with that, except that <r> is still a bit long
to type and r usually implies rests. We'd better have a single special
character such as &:

<c e g>4 &2 ~ &1

Regards,
Valentin