I'm having a hard time getting LilyPond to do just what I want here. It's actually not that different from the "Jurassic Park" example given in section 5.11.5 of the manual: I have a song whose rhythm varies slightly to accommodate the lyrics in a second verse. The given example has wholly different rhythms, but in mine, out of 32 measures there are just two places where one note is split in two. (I'm using LP 2.5.0, as distributed via Fink for MacOS X. I don't think that's relevant, but if what I'm describing are LP bugs rather than just me not understanding, let me know and I'll upgrade.)
When I tried just duplicating the whole melody, I got pages and pages of warnings about "too many clashing notecolumns". Even after I narrowed down the alternate melody to its minimal form (along with lots of spacer notes), I still got clashes for the notes I specified. Contra what seems to be happening in the example, this method just overprints the corresponding notes (completely obliterating the original line); see first example linked below. Then I tried just using melismata as suggested earlier on the page. It seemed to basically work in the first case (f8 ~ f); in the second, using tilde produced something really bizarre that slurred together the whole line; using a formal slur (d4.( f8)) worked better and set into something that looked nice, at least. (See second link.) But it's not really correct. In the one-syllable version, I want that to be a half note on D; I only want the eighth-note F when it's needed for an extra syllable. For my third attempt, I tried to play with the polyphony features, and I'm having a heck of a time getting those to work right with the lyrics. If I use straight-up polyphony with anonymous << >> blocks, I can associate lyrics to voices 1 and 2 for the *first* instance, but I can't seem to access the second. (Third link.) And when I try to actually use \associatedVoice, the first instance goes fine, but it cuts off the verses at the second rhythmic change and completely re-sets the music to be all squished together. (Fourth.) And when I go ahead and actually name the contexts, the layout becomes tractable again, and the lyrics are in the right place, but we're back to clashing notecolumns and simply overprinting the other parts. (Fifth.) Since I originally wanted the second part to have smaller note heads anyway, I thought maybe I'd just A) make them smaller and B) manually perturb the note heads. But while I can use \set fontSize to solve the first problem, I haven't yet figured out what to poke to make the note head and stem all move together. (I guess I could separately add the same offset to NoteHead and Stem, but that seems unsatisfactory.) Thanks for any advice you can give... I love the program, I'm a longtime LaTeX user, and I'm definitely looking forward to using LP as its equivalent for music engraving. :) Ex 1: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/altmelody.ly Ex 2: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/melismata.ly Ex 3: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/poly1.ly Ex 4: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/poly2.ly Ex 5: http://www.blahedo.org/ly/poly3.ly -- -=-Don [EMAIL PROTECTED]<http://www.blahedo.org/>-=- "Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can't do anything about that." --Joel Spolsky _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user