Re: Absolute Beginners

[Geoff Horton]

> Geoff, there is indeed a fist in English, not the first, but hitting
> harder than a spell check. Here's with the corrections (is
> "corrections" the right English word?)

It is indeed. A few other things I noticed in reading through it again:

> You can, of course, change these and all other defaults; indeed you
> can engrave old plainchant, contemporary notation, orchestral scores,
> do MIDI files, and more. But all that lies further down the road. For
> the moment, we will teach you how to engrave a simple melody.

Plainchant engraving doesn't work well at the moment, so you might
want to omit mentioning it here.

> You can analyze the exercise and see that the first note e appears a
> third above middle c rather than a sixth below; the same happens with
> the following g in relation to the preceding e; then comes a c a
> fourth above the g instead of a fifth below, an so forth.

"then comes a c a" is confusing. It looks at first glance as if both
"a"s are pitches, not the English indefinite article. I can't come up
with a good way to fix this at the moment.

> You change the clef changing the term "treble" to

Would "word" be better than "term"? Also, the most recent preceding
example used an alto clef. If the examples are numbered, you could
refer to the one you want.

> You can amuse yourself writing all possible and also impossible
> examples of simple melodies, and see what happens. Don't worry,
> whatever you type, you can't break it...

I would change that last sentence, because it is easy enough to type
things that won't compile, and a new user might well regard that as
"breaking it".

> (Please note that this is not necessarily the way you are used to
> naming the notes, just a quick, logical and easy way to work with
> LilyPond.)

Can you perhaps add something like: "If you would prefer to use more
familiar names, see the section in the manual on "note names in other
languages.""?

Geoff