Re: possible engraving error involving harmonics

[Neil Puttock]

Hi Tom,

2008/8/26 Tom Cloyd <address@hidden>:
> I don't know enough to know if something's really wrong here, but in the
> following code snippet -
>
>  \relative c'{
>    <<
>    { < e'  fis g >4 ^"arm. 12 - -" r2. }
>    \\
>    { b4 s2.}
>    \\        { s4 <e,,\harmonic b''\harmonic e\harmonic>2. \fermata }
>    >>
>    }|
>
> all 3 voices are supposed to have 4 beats. The bar check is OK. Yet the
> harmonic note heads in the bottom voice are half notes only - no dot
> following. I may be a little muddled about notation of harmonics...in which
> case the bug isn't in Lilypad!

Since you're notating a natural harmonic chord, you're better off
setting the notehead style, which will give you the dots back:

{ s4 \once \override NoteHead #'style = #'harmonic <e,, b'' e>2. }

\harmonic is designed for notating artificial harmonics (e.g. on a
violin), where you'd usually have a chord with a normal notehead
showing the basic pitch and a diamond-shaped notehead for the node to
touch; by convention these are always half notes, though I agree with
you that they should have dots, if present. It's a hard-coded
typesetting decision in LilyPond to remove the dots, so there's no way
to override its behaviour.

It's at this point that somebody's bound to come along and say
"Gardner Read says artificial harmonics should never be dotted",
though most of the scores I've seen show the dots. I think it would be
better to have the option to show the dots, in the same way we have
the property harmonicAccidentals to determine whether accidentals are
visible on harmonics, so I'm just going to submit a patch to fix this.

Regards,
Neil