Horizontal beams & reduced beams

[Sebastiano Vigna]

To get horizontal beams (I know, they're usually horrible, but essential
in drum scores) the manual suggest to set beam damping to 100000. I
tried even 1000000000, but still they are not really horizontal.

Rune Zedeler proposed in 2002 on this list a hack to that purpose, but
know it causes Scheme errors... and I'd prefer something more stable.

Suggestions?


For the same reason, I need smaller beams. Often you get independent
parts on the hi-hat, on the bass drum and on the snare (e.g., bossa
nova). The stems of the middle part (the snare) must be shorter.

By playing a lot with beamed-length and related properties I've been
able to get shorter beamed stems, BUT their bottom is always aligned
with a ledger line: thus either they are too long (if they touch the
last line) and collide with the bass, or they are too short (if they
touch the next-to-last line) and they are ugly. What should I tweak to
get them "in the middle"?

-- 
Ciao,

                                        seba