Bagpipe Music with Lilypond

[Andrew McNabb]

This last week I've made some more progress with using Lilypond with
bagpipe music.  I'm just starting to get over the hump of the learning
curve.  I have a few comments to share with regard to getting Lilypond
to do bagpipe music.  I'm certain that I'll also have a few questions in
the very near future.

First of all, thanks to Mats for his information on how to get things
working with 32nd notes which are grace notes.  I added the following to
the beginning of my \notes section:

#(add-grace-property 'Voice 'Stem 'beamed-lengths '(2.6 2.6 4.2))

This resulted in good-looking 32nd notes (see the output in
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/comments/pipemusic/beaton-part3.png ), as
opposed to the default (in 2.2, anyway), which makes the beams intersect
the note heads.

Another change I made was to create a function "beam-always-down", since
in bagpipe music, the beams on normal notes always go down while the
beams on grace notes always go up.  I added the following line to my
notes section:

\override Beam #'dir-function = #beam-always-down

Perhaps others would find it useful to have this function available, so
maybe it could be added to scm/beam.scm.  The following is my
implementation, which obviously suffers from my utter lack of knowledge
of Scheme (I don't know a better way to say "false"):

#(define-public (beam-always-down count total) (= 1 2) )

Anyway, that's where I'm at for now.  Thanks again to all of you who
work on Lilypond.  Its output is beautiful.

-- 
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55  8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868