Re: Accidentals: Unwanted naturals

[Tim McNamara]

On Aug 25, 2009, at 3:50 AM, Simon Mackenzie wrote:

> Sorry but as a first time user to lilypond and music in general  
> this section in the tutorial was about as clear as mud to me.
> Not wanting to offend anyone just stating how I felt the fist time  
> I read this section in the learning tutorial.


I'm not sure why this is difficult.  In the code you must write the  
note you want.  If you want a B flat, you must write "bes" (if using  
the default language for LilyPond).  If you want B you write "b" and  
if you want B# you write "bis".  LilyPond cannot guess whether you  
want B, Bb or B#.  It seems to me that by the end of the text under  
the two examples about accidentals, this should be straightforwardly  
clear.  Is there some way of phrasing this that would have made it  
clearer for you?

BTW, doing it this way is what allows LilyPond to transpose music to  
different keys cleanly and accurately.  This makes life so much  
easier for the user when arranging for horns and other transposing  
instruments, doing orchestral music, jazz, transposing for singers, etc.

For the developers, I think that something is confusing here for  
English speakers:  the use of -es and -is for flatted and sharped  
notes as the default.  I was initially bewildered by this, not  
knowing that the default conventions are Dutch.  This seems odd given  
that the default language for the Web site and documentation is  
pretty much English, so I think some confusion on the part of newbies  
when Dutch is used in the code can be forgiven.

If the user is "new to music in general" then they have set  
themselves a daunting task trying to score music with LilyPond.   
There is no way for the documentation to make up for the user's lack  
of knowledge about the structure of music.  My condolences there but  
I see no responsibility for the LilyPond documentation to tutor users  
in music, only in the use of the program.