Re: Is there a short way of forcing a particular octave?

[David Wright]

On Wed 21 Dec 2016 at 20:43:20 (-0500), Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> > I haven't noticed any effect with polyphony: the octavation of the
> > next note in the source is always determined by the previous one.
> 
> Cut and paste one section and move it later — it has a better than 50/50 
> chance of being wrong.
> Change the order of voices — it has a better than 50/50 chance of being wrong.
> etc.

Quite right, you have to check the octavation of the first note and
the last+1 note. Whether that is onerous or not depends.
In my own case (transcribing music), those sorts of errors are removed
at the same time as adding omitted durations and suchlike; it's the
first pass after actually typing it in, and precedes marrying the
lyrics to the notes. In your case, see below.

> > Chords are different but simple: when you get to the > at the end of a
> > chord, the next note in the source is related to the first note of that
> > chord; ie in a sequence of chords, their first notes form the
> > \relative sequence. What gets in the way of what?
> 
> The order of the notes in the chord is thus forced/constrained by \relative 
> mode (i.e., changing them might change octavation), and hence tweaks might 
> have to be moved around. (To be fair, this limitation has been relieved 
> almost entirely by \single and the ability to \tweak inside a chord, but 
> still…)

Do you mean things like
\relative { <c'' g e c> <g c e, c> <e g c c,> <c e g c> }
?

> etc.

Yes, the rest was commenting on Nathan Ho's post.

> Look: I’m glad you like \relative mode. But after a decade of using \relative 
> (and running into many frustrations) followed by nearly a decade of using 
> \absolute (with no such frustrations), you’ve got a serious uphill battle 
> convincing me that \relative is superior.  =)

I'm not trying to convince you of any such thing. I wrote "I can't see
the point in *avoiding any methodology* that makes things easier and
more reliable." I'm not trying to convince you to use it. I'm just
worried about people's attempts to *dissuade others from* using it,
as if there's something wrong or immature about it.

The examples you gave above were both about editing what's already
written into LP source, and I know that you are composing directly
into LP. Doing that would be much more difficult with \relative than
\absolute.

You wrote "I am slowly converting all my old code to \absolute".
Is this a difficult process? I just type

rel2abs <source-file>
abs2rel <source-file>

at will, depending what I am about to do. (Both are functions of
the ly command.) Being "stuck" in the wrong mode is never an
issue. (My only niggle is that ly doesn't write the "implied f"
variant of \relative { }.) My principle is to let the computer do
all the dirty work; I'll make what I have to do as simple and as
little as I can manage.

Cheers,
David.

PS Does anyone know why all our posts now (since ~4 days) have a
strange "Sender:" header added to them (which my email client adds to
the Cc: list when I reply)?

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