Re: stem up or down in definition?

[Mats Bengtsson]

Quintijn Hoogenboom wrote:
> Mats helped me tremendous with a "tamtam" mode.
>
> I now redefine notes like:
>
> drumPitchNames = #'(
>    (t . lefttenor)
>    (T . righttenor)
>    (b . bass)
>    (B . rightbass)
>    )
>
>
> #(define mydrums '(
>    (lefttenor   default   "marcato"   2)
>    (righttenor  default   #f            1)
>    (bass                cross     "open"      0)
>    (rightbass   xcircle   "stopped"   -1)
>    ))

I'm sure these are not the symbols you want. I just made up something to
illustrate the possibilities.

> I encountered strange problems (which were before on this list I believe)
> that PDF output could not be found. It seems this was caused by a undefined
> note (I tried to use r for rest, but it was not in the list).

Rests should work well anyway, since they are handled separately. I
tried to insert some rests in the example I sent you earlier and they
produce ordinary rest symbols without problems.

> After define (r . rest) and (rest rest) it worked.
This should definitely not be necessary!

> Two other questions: 
>
> 1. can I force stem up or stem down in the defitions above?
> 2. can I include a fixed liric for each note? I would like to have T
> (righttenor) to have stem up and "T" below the note, likewise t (lefttenor)
> stem down and t above.

As far as I know, you cannot do any of these using the builtin support
for drum pitch symbols. The manual solution is simple:
\stemDown t4^"t"  \stemUp T2^"T"
Unfortunately, you cannot write a simple macro that does all these 
steps, since there is no way to specify the duration as a parameter to
a macro. However, if you know how to program using the Scheme language,
you can implement a function that you apply to the full piece and which
adds the desired properties and text scripts. Maybe you can convince one
of the Scheme hackers on the mailing list to do it, unfortunately, I'm 
not one of them.

  /Mats