Re: separating music and guitar instructions

[Kaz Kylheku]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:27:37 +0200, "Vicente Solsona"
<address@hidden> wrote:
> To sumarise:
> 
> String numbers, harmonics and right hand fingerings *must* be defined
> inside a chord construct even if there is only a single note.
> 
> you can attach finger numbers to single notes:
> 
>       a-1 b-2 c-1-2-3-4 % etc
> 
> but you need to put the notes inside chords <> to attach string numbers,
> harmonics and right hand fingers, even if it's a single note:

That is untrue. You must attach fingerings to chorded notes if you want
to display them next to the note head. Otherwise the fingerings are
just
another piece of vertical material, like a fret diagram or chord name.

Most of the time, this is best because fingering indications inside
the staff clutters the notes. Good musicians don't need it, and
may even disagree with the fingering, in which case it's worse
than useless.

If you have fingerings for two-voice music, the top voice fingers can
go above, and the bottom voice below, which is a perfectly good 
notation.

If there are three or more voices, that's when you might want to have
the middle voice fingering next to the head. This is the place where
you run into the Lilypond annyoance that the note must be in a chord.
In terms of the music, it already is, but the chord is arising from
the meeting of multiple voices, not from the <chord construct>.

Strictly speaking, it's not necessary for the fingering to be next
to the note head. Lilypond will happily stack multiple fingerings.
So you can achieve something like

 1
 2

  |
  |
(*)
  |
(*)

(*)
|
|

 3


This is an acceptable notation; it does not have to be:

  |
  |
(*) 1
  |
(*) 2

(*) 3
|
|

If you think that the musicians who will be playing the music
require that much detailed guidance (e.g. you're writing
a "how-to-play-guitar" type book for beginners) why not
give them fret diagrams.