Re: Sibelius user looking for the easiest way to learn LilyPond

[Rodolfo Zitellini]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 2:52 PM, John Link <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Mar 12, 2012, at 9:42 AM, David Bobroff wrote:
>
> On 3/11/2012 6:39 PM, John Link wrote:
>
> A few years ago I was encouraged to try LilyPond as an alternative to
> Sibelius because LilyPond produced more beautiful scores. I was also told
> that it would allow me to do things like specify that bars 25 through 32 are
> to be identical to bars 9 through 16 and avoid cutting and pasting from bars
> 9-16 into 25-32. I liked what I heard, but I was quite shocked by LilyPond's
> interface. I would be interested in hearing from any Sibelius users who have
> successfully learned LilyPond. How can I get going in LilyPond as quickly as
> possible?
>
> In case it's relevant, I should add that I used to program in FORTRAN and a
> little bit of UNIX but never in any other languages.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> John Link
>
>
> Hi John,
>
> I can't really speak to LilyPond vs Sibelius use.  On the other hand, I used
> to be a Finale user and I have had *very* limited contact with Sibelius.
> Having said that, while I'm aware of differences between Sibelius and Finale
> they share a major feature; namely, an interactive graphical user interface
> which displays your music while you work.  LilyPond, as you have likely
> discerned, does not work that way at all.  I have found that, for me at
> least, the learning curve for LilyPond is not terribly steep, but it's
> long-ish.  I know just about nothing about FORTRAN aside from the fact that
> it's an old programming language, but I would imagine that having
> programming experience would be helpful.
>
> I think the main hurdle is getting used to focusing on the informational
> content as you input your scores and worry about output later if you need to
> tweak it.  The idea is that LilyPond should do the actual 'engraving' for
> you without much intervention on your part.
>
> Hope this was useful,
>
> -David
>
>
> Thank you, David. What you wrote is very helpful. Here are a few more
> questions:
>
> 1) What is the easiest way to extract parts from a score?
>
> 2) Are there any features in Finale (or Sibelius or any other scorewriter
> with a GUI) that you wish you had in LilyPond?
>
> Thanks,
> John
>

I do professional engraving in both finale and lilypond, and I have
been using almost exclusively lily for my projects (i.e. when the
client does not require finale) in the last four years.
As others said, go through the learning manual and take some time.
When I first switched I had a couple things that took me some time to
adapt, missing graphical interface frontmost. If you are used to
finale/sibelius, this is indeed shocking as the first times you use
lilypond it is very difficult to correlate your textual input to what
will end up in the pdf. It took me some deal of time to stop finding
the layout as "magical". Now when I enter the music I generally
already have an idea of what I will find on the layout. The other
thing was structuring the input file, \score, \new Staff etc., which
you will need to spend some time studying, but is no rocket science,
in the end it is quite easy. And after you figure this out you will
have access to the very powerful movement layout features you have in
lilypond (i.e. you can structure easily very complex multi-movement
pieces, I wish finale could do this too).

As for learning, I suggest, after you go through the learning manual,
to just start and engrave some simple music, let's say a polyphonic
piece with no single-staff polyphony and text, just to see the
relation from the input to the output. When you get a good gasp of
what is happening, you can add more stuff, like lyrics, then a piano
piece with polyphony and chords. By when you can typeset a mildly
complex piano piece at ease, I think you already have figured out all
the basics. From then on you just need to learn to use the reference
manuals and snippets to figure out more complex things. It will take
some time, but you will never look back :)

BTW I do not use a 100% pure lilypond workflow, as I generally enter
all my music in finale (using speedy) and the export to musicxml and
then to lilypond. I do this particularly with vocal scores, as I'm
lazy and I prefer to enter the text in finale :)
As for typesetting speed, using finale's speedy entry and entering the
notes directly in lilypond format take, for me, the same time.

And to reply to your last questions, no I do not miss anything from
finale in lilypond, while it is true the other way round: now that I
am proficent in lily I miss many of it's features in finale! Multi
movement pieces and figured bass as an example (even if I think
sibelius supports those)

Just my 2c :)
Ciao!

Rodolfo