Re: 4-Drum Conga Notation in LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Thomas Morley <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Eric,
>
> sorry to come back to you that late.
>
> 2012/12/13 Eric Pancer <address@hidden>:
>> On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 6:05 PM, Thomas Morley
>> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 2012/12/12 Eric Pancer <address@hidden>:
>>>> On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Eric Pancer <address@hidden> wrote:
>> [..]
>>>> I've got this working using the following definition:
>>>>
>>>> #(define mydrums '(
>>>> (bassdrum  default   #f  -3)
>>>> (snare        default   #f    0)
>>>> (hihat         default     #f  1)
>>>> (lowtom     default   #f     3)))
>>>>
>>>> Of course I don't exactly understand what the #f is, but do get the
>>>> numerical values are positions in the staff. A bit of explanation
>>>> could help me.
>>>
>>> Every entry in your new list consists of the name, note-head,
>>> use-which-script-sign? and staff-position.
>>
>> Thank you. Where is that documented?
>
> AFAIK, nowhere. I deduced it from the code

Ugh.  Maybe we should do something about that if this is supposed to be
user-extensible.

>> Is C6 considered "0"?
>
> Well, here I'm the one who is confused. I never heard "C6" and the
> others you mention below.

A privilege of being German: we are used to Helmholtz notation.  I just
looked through the LilyPond documentation and was surprised that we
actually have _no_ mention of scientific pitch notation
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_pitch_notation> which is
used pretty much exclusively in the U.S.A., consequently in
"international" English music texts, and likely elsewhere.

If you have any Midi equipment displaying pitches in human-readable
manner, it is unlikely that it will use anything but scientific pitch
notation for specifying the octave.

So it would likely be a good idea to document those relations somewhere.
As a rule of thumb, middle c (c' in LilyPond) is C4, and the dreaded
Queen of the Night coloratura soprano aria "Der Hölle Rache kocht in
meinem Herzen" reaches up to F6.

-- 
David Kastrup