Use fingering notation for percussion and drum “sti cking”

[Ben Finney]

Howdy all,

Some time ago, there was a discussion about percussion notation:

"Trevor Daniels" <address@hidden> writes:

> I know nothing of percussion myself, so I'll copy this to -user to
> elicit some responses from those that do.  In particular, how best to
> indicate "sticking", and the notation for a drum-roll.

My interest here is with the “sticking” notation (telling LilyPond which
hand to use for a note).

The workaround that is now in the manual suggests using “n^"L"” and
“n^"R"”, the normal note annotation feature.

But this is not ideal, since the note cannot then have both “sticking”
and an arbitrary annotation.


What would be better is for the “fingering” feature to support “L” and
“R” as fingers.

As the earlier discussion pointed out in a message from Levi Hendricks:

> Also, sticking is just as important for a percussionist as fingering
> is for piano player. I understand how to use a -4 suffix to add a
> fingering to a note, but I have not had success with this in drummode.

So “sticking” is “fingering” for percussion. It's essentially the same
information, just with different values to be shown; and should ideally
be in the same place and use the same notation feature.

For example:

    c c8 c8-R c8-L^"Ben's favourite note" c8-R->

The ‘n-R’ and ‘n-L’ (where ‘n’ is whatever note is chosen) would be
interpreted as fingers, just as ‘n-1’, ‘n-2’, and so on, and render
using the same markup and position.

As another possibility, perhaps the ‘n-1’ and ‘n-2’ notation could be
used in the document, but *rendered* as the characters “R” and “L” by
some configuration.

Can any of this be achieved already, perhaps with a customisation in the
LilyPond document? I am a newbie, so I have no idea how this would be
done.

-- 
 \          “Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a |
  `\                                          feature.” —Rich Kulawiec |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney