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From: | Tim McNamara |
Subject: | Re: Lilypond and Jazz chords |
Date: | Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:58:23 -0500 |
On Jun 23, 2009, at 11:36 PM, Carl D. Sorensen wrote:
On 6/23/09 5:19 PM, "Tim McNamara" <address@hidden> wrote:On Jun 23, 2009, at 12:24 PM, Carl D. Sorensen wrote:On 6/23/09 9:16 AM, "Grammostola Rosea" <address@hidden> wrote:Tim McNamara wrote:On Jun 15, 2009, at 2:00 PM, Kieren MacMillan wrote:Would it be reasonable to separate the functions of putting notes onWol et al:the staff and chord names above the staff, and let the user spell out the chord names separately from the notes on the staff? Doing so might really simplify this discussion and result in better control of the final output.To me (but I'm not a real experienced jazz musician or lilypond user) I agree with this comment. Keep things simple!?But this facility a) doesn't exist in LilyPond b) would require changes to the parser, and c) has nobody who is willing to pursue doing it.I think I may have written my comment poorly. What I meant was having LilyPond *not* parse <c e g b> into a Cmaj7 chord name above the staff at all. The parser is just going to run into trouble trying to interpret something like <e c e ges bes d> as C9b5/E because it can't read the intent of the user, only the notes in the bracket about which it can only make its best guess. It would probably come up with Em7b5sus4 or something which is not the same thing in terms of musical intent, and musical intent is what the musician playing the piece wants to know.I think I understood your intent. The problem is that the *only* way we have to input chords is in formats that enter notes (either <e c' e ges besd> or \chordmode {c:9.5-/e}). There is *no* facility in LilyPond for entering chords as text.
OK, there's still some poor phrasing on my part since I consider using \chordmode as entering chord names as text (e.g., not notes). Sorry for any confusion.
The parsing of c:9.5-/e converts that string into a set of pitches, along with a bass and an inversion (at least I think it does; I haven't reviewed it carefully for a while, and when I did review it I wasn't as familiar withLilyPond as I am now).The project that Thomas is working on is making sure that when the output of \chordmode{c:9.5-/e} is passed to the chordnames context, it will give bagc9b5/E in the appropriate format.
Right, currently many of us are using exception files to achieve this.
I would recommend requiring the user to write the chord names out in a text entry format (e.g., c1:9.5-/e or something like that) *if* they want chord names above the staff and not parsing note entry to get chord names (if indeed LilyPond can do this at all, I've never looked into it). This makes the most sense to me (and I hope my intent is clearer).Right now, the ChordNames context works much better with chords entered in \chordmode, because it knows the root and the inversion, rather than havingto try to guess the chord.I suspect that there won't be a lot of effort right now trying to deal withinversions or added basses, but that may come in the future.In my opinion, the biggest problem we currently have is that we don't always get good chord names out of \chordmode chords. But I think Thomas will havethat fixed shortly....
Way cool!
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