Re: Three slurs from a single voice to three voices?

[Simon Albrecht]

Hi Kevin,

On 02/06/2022 22:56, Kevin Cole wrote:
> The hand-written score I'm looking at shows an F# with three slurs
> coming off of it going to each of the three notes in the following
> measure. I tried the following but it only shows one slur. What did I
> miss?


without context it’s hard to tell what the original notation wanted to 
achieve, so this is only one suggestion to fix some aspects that may or 
may not fit that context.

– One technical issue is this: If you write

\new Voice \voiceTwo { c4 }

then the Voice you explicitly created will contain _only_ the \voiceTwo 
command. The following music expression is separate and will again go 
into the voice context you were previously in. Move the brace:

\new Voice { \voiceTwo c4 }

Now there’s only one music expression which goes into the new Voice, and 
the \voiceTwo command works on the following music.

– LilyPond has a way of having slurs across Voices by moving 
Slur_engraver to the Staff (or a higher-level) context and linking the 
slurs like this:
{
  fs'4\=1 ( \=2 (
  <<
    { \voiceOne b'4\=1 ) }
    \new Voice { \voiceTwo d'4\=2 ) }
  >>
}

However, it isn’t very good (yet?) at making this look good, and in fact 
it can quickly get very difficult to make it look good at all.

– In general, having more than two independent parts on one Staff 
usually leads to difficult engraving issues that would generally be best 
solved by using more than one Staff, especially if it’s vocal music with 
Lyrics on top of everything.

What I suggest here is merging the bottom two parts into one Voice since 
they share the same rhythm. Note how the two music expressions end up in 
one Voice, and only the third one doesn’t because of the \new Voice.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\version "2.22.1"
\language "english"

\new Staff {
  \relative c' {
    \time 4/4
    \key d \major
    d2 r4
    <<
      {
        \voiceTwo
        fs4(
        d2) cs4 cs4      |
        d2 d2             |
      }
      {
        s4
        b2 as4 as4       |
        b2 b2             |
      }
      \new Voice {
        \voiceOne
        fs'4~
        fs4( g) g4 fs4   |
        fs4( b4) b2       |
      }
    >>
    \oneVoice
  }
}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

This will work with Lyrics as well, since the Voice context first 
created continues all the way through.

HTH, Simon