Re: film score example

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

2013/9/13 Curt <address@hidden>:
> 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

Congratulations, and thanks for your feedback!  It's very valuable.  I
have a few comments.

> 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 think that we should add to LilyPond a simple, user-friendly
interface that would allow choosing the "density" of music, so that
one could write
\layout { \horizontalSpacingLoose }
and it would result in common-shortest-duration being increased by
some factor.  Writing this function should be simple, anyone wants to
try it?

> - 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

Please take a look at this snippet:
http://github.com/openlilylib/snippets/blob/master/input-shorthands/articulations-not-aligned-with-notes.ly
It has some issues, but you'll get an idea immediately after compiling
it.  I think it's clever and could probably be added to default
LilyPond.

> - 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.

I had a few ideas for fixing this (smart alignment based on logical
structure of glyphs, and making special versions of accidentals for
using inside text), but there was not enough interest yet.  If you'd
like to help with this, we may look at it.

> - 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.

If i understood correctly what you mean by "subito dynamic right after
a hairpin", this would be another case where smart alignment would
help.  And a better interface for creating custom dynamics.

> - 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.

I agree that it would be good to have more flexibility when placing markups.

cheers,
Janek