film score example

[Curt]

Hi all - 

About a year ago, several of you answered questions of mine about notating a 
film score.  I reached a stopping point with the first cue and learned a bit 
more about git, so I have the first film cue from the score up on github now:

https://github.com/tunesmith/TheForgivingSea

(pdf of score at: 
https://github.com/tunesmith/TheForgivingSea/blob/master/1M2/pdf/1M2.pdf )

The score was originally prepared (in Sibelius) a few years ago, under the 
tutelage of a professional hollywood film composer, Hummie Mann, and was 
performed/recorded by a volunteer orchestra, so it's been through several 
revisions to tighten it up.  This project was to re-notate it in lilypond.  
It's also a simple, short score, so it might be useful for various learning 
purposes.  I'm also more than happy to receive any suggestions or "pull 
requests" on how to improve the score or simplify the lilypond coding.

Appended below is part of one of the README's - the "unexpected difficulties" I 
had with lilypond, as in the areas that didn't seem to work easily right away.  
(Note that I started this re-notation project as a complete lilypond beginner.) 
 A big one here is "giant time signatures", which are common in film scores but 
don't seem to have a graceful solution in lilypond.  Please note that these are 
just the (minor) complaints, and that overall I was *extremely* happy with the 
experience and output.  I did this all in eclipse (elysium) on a 15"  MacBook 
Pro and loved the "coding" experience.

Thanks for all your help, I hope someone finds this useful!

Curt

~^~^~^~^

Unexpectedly hard parts of creating this score (all specific to v2.16):

- General spacing and staff sizes.  I believe Lilypond by default puts 
everything 
        too close together for music that is read by instrumentalists, 
particularly
        sight-readers.  The spacing commands are easy to use, but difficult to 
find
        and look up if you don't already know them.
        
- I make liberal use of "tagging" for part extraction.  It appears this is the 
best
        way to handle minor differences between parts and full scores.
        
- Hairpins are surprisingly difficult.  Most instruments do not have a natural
        decay, so hairpins don't necessarily start or end right at the note
        boundaries.  It's necessary to use "fake voices" in these cases.  Even
        with this, it didn't support having a decrescendo end at the Fine bar - 
        I had to make it end at a note value before the Fine bar.  And
        if you have ties over these fake voices, you have to know about
        \set tieWaitForNote = ##t
        
- Header text elements are a bit bearish to configure.  Our instructions were to
        put the instrument name in the "upper left" of each part; I ended up 
using
        the out of the box "poet" slot, and then later reconfigured all of 
        bookTitleMarkup to reposition "instrument" when it became clear I'd 
need 
        the "instrument" slot for later pages.  It also could be easier to put 
a 
        simple newline in, for longer instrument names.
        
- The alignment of the flat sign in text markup like "Clarinet in Bb" is 
difficult.
        I gave up on this one because the approach to make it look right felt 
too
        hard-coded.
        
- The "\sustainOff" right-alignment looks bad to me.  It should end at the 
barline
        or at the rest you stop pedaling; not right afterward.  Pedaling 
usually implies
        you pedal for the duration of the note, but not longer.
        
- It was difficult to figure out how to create a percussion staff where someone
        switched from a pitched instrument to a rhythm instrument.  Also, I'm 
not 
        quite convinced on the choice for a percussive half note- I've seen 
open-heads
        in these situations before, but I found it impossible to override the 
notehead
        in \drummode.
        
- It was extremely hard to specify a subito dynamic right after a hairpin.  This
        is a relatively common use-case, but I had to pull in a pretty 
complicated
        scheme function, and modify it, to make it work as expected.  This one 
requirement
        probably took around six hours.

- Making courtesy/cautionary accidentals show up in just the parts was a more 
        verbose process than it needed to be, it seemed.  I wasn't able to do 
this
        reliably unless I tagged the entire measure.  The programmer in me 
wanted
        to just tag the cautionary accidental alone.
        
- Fermatas were often misaligned, too close to or colliding with slurs.  Manual
        padding was necessary.
        
- In film scoring, it's common to include the information of the SMPTE timecode
        of when a last note in a cue gets cut off, for the instruments that are 
        playing at that time.  It was not possible to make a \markup element 
        right-align with the final barline.  This eventually required a few 
        overrides to Score.RehearsalMark - not too bad, but it felt a bit 
        hackish.
        
- Specifying an arbitrary bar number (like after a long multi-rest) is not
        supported out of the box, but I found a lovely, concise snippet to 
        help with this at http://lsr.dsi.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=431
        
- Eyeglasses are sometimes used in the bottom right of a page to remind an
        instrumentalist that there really is another page.  I had to override
        rehearsal mark in a few ways to get this to work.
        
- One interesting semi-bug is that top-markup-spacing doesn't seem to apply
        to 2nd pages (and later pages) of scores, even if they have the 
instrument
        name at the top of the page.  When I got to two-page parts, I had to 
        rejigger my formatting to use a larger top-margin, introduce 
        top-system-spacing, and reduce top-markup-spacing.

- It would be nice if, in a PianoStaff, you could invoke "sustainOn" in the
        upper staff (for instance if you're in a melody-only section) but still
        easily have the pedal markings show below the lower staff.
        
- Figuring out large bar numbers was difficult, and it actually required some
        alpha code that is included in an issue in the lilypond issue tracker.
        The mailing list was *great* at pointing this out, thanks Nick!
        
- Giant time signatures are actually somewhat common for film scores, but
        difficult to create in any notation system.  Best option I came up 
        with was to jack up the font size and assign them to staff groups.