Re: chord durations

[Tim McNamara]

On Sep 1, 2009, at 9:30 PM, Christian Henning wrote:

> Am I right, that lilypond is rarely used for my type of notation?
> Meaning rock/pop tunes for acoustic guitar.

No, the style of music makes no difference.  But LilyPond is intended  
for engraving music which is fundamentally based upon notes on the  
staff,  and you seem to be just writing out chord progressions  
without a melody.  LilyPond is really not designed for this.  If you  
were writing in the melody with the chords above the staff, many of  
your problems would be resolved.  I think that what you are trying to  
do is to write out lead sheets, but you don't seem to have the melody  
for the songs.  The other option, I suppose, would be to make the  
melody a bunch of rests (e.g., r1 for each bar) and write out the  
duration of the chords as the total beat count (g1:7 rather than  
g16:7 sixteen times in a bar).

I'll send you a sample lead sheet back-channel, since it's  
copyrighted and bad form to send an entire copyrighted song via the  
mailing list.  I don't have time to write up a fake song this morning.