Re: relative mode occasionally gets forgotten?

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Graham Percival 
<address@hidden> writes
> On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 06:46:39AM -0600, Carl D. Sorensen wrote:
> > First, I think that the information above should be put into 1.1.1 Writing
> > Pitches as examples under Relative octave entry.  There should be three
> > separate items/examples:
> >
> > When relative blocks are nested, the innermost relative block applies.
> >
> > \relative c' { d e f \relative c'' { d e f}}
>
> Woah, that's froody!  I would have never expected that!
>
> > Note:  I haven't tested any of these examples.
>
> I tested the above, because I just couldn't believe it.  Anyway, I
> agree with these proposals.
When I first saw Chip's example, my reaction was "why on earth would you 
want to do that?"

As I understand it, \relative converts from note names to absolute 
pitches. Pretty much everything else in lily works on pitches. In a .ly 
file you don't know, on seeing a "c", which c it is - middle, top, low, 
whatever. If it's wrapped in a \relative{}, that assigns a pitch to it. 
Anything else on seeing it assumes it's "c in the bass clef" as that's 
the pitch assigned to the note "c".

So, I don't know how to word it, but when you're talking about \relative 
in the manual it should say that you should only use \relative 
immediately around your note names because it converts note names to 
absolute pitches. If there's another operator inside your \relative (ie 
in Chip's case, a \transpose, in the example above an inner \relative) 
that forces absolute pitches, then the \relative will do nothing because 
it doesn't know what to do with a pitch.

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden