Re: new to lilypond

[David Kastrup]

James Harkins <address@hidden> writes:

> For accidentals, df and des are both abbreviations -- favoring
> concision -- but one is more concise than the other, and neither is
> inherently more readable.

Uh, no?  df is an abbreviation, but des is a proper pronouncable name
(if you are Dutch/German, that's the name you use when talking about
music).  As such, it has a letter combination that is natural to scan.

Indeed, English has both dflat as well as df, while Dutch/German has
only des and nothing else.  The multi-word equivalent to "d flat" would
be "d mit einem b-chen" but that's kid talk.  No musician would use
that.

Now if you use ds and df often enough, they'll become more than
abbreviations to you, but you still can't easily pronounce them as
non-abbreviations.

> If we wanted efficiency and global readability, we might try db and
> d#, but I guess the # would confuse the parser.

You could use d♭ and d♯ but they are rather cumbersome to type.  And
actually, they are not considerably more readable since they are half
name, half symbol.  While one uses them for chord names, for single
notes they seem sort of unusuable.

-- 
David Kastrup