On 09/02/2022 07:16, Alasdair McAndrew wrote:
I'm sorry about all these damn-fool queries of mine; I promise to go
back under my rock soon. Anyway:
In the current 18th century suite I'm typesetting (for two treble
instruments without bass), there is a separate variable (containing the
notes) for each part of each movement. Then there are global
declarations about the instruments, and the key and time-signature of
each movement; and these are all brought together in score blocks.
The one thing I don't know how to do is to declare the relative pitch
globally. Thus, each music variable looks like
movement1_part1 = \new Voice \relative c'' { notes, notes, and more notes }
The difficulty is that I want to re-set the second part for a bass
instrument, so it might start off as
movement1_part2 = \new Voice \relative c { notes, notes, and more notes }
Currently this means changing the relative pitch for each movement
individually. It would be much more efficient to be able to do this
just once at the beginning, with an appropriate global declaration. Can
this be done? Is there a way to set the relative pitch of some music in
a \global block?
(Note, I have indeed RTFM, but it's quite hard - even with the search
function - to find answers to this, or examples of such use. Hence this
message...)
I don't know any way of doing what you want HOW you want. However, in
the modern world, I have to do a lot of this sort of thing with \transpose.
So what I'd do is
notes_movement1_part1 = \relative c'' { notes, notes, and more notes }
movement1_part1 = \new Voice \relative c'' { notes_movement1_part1 }
movement1_part2 = \new Voice \transpose c c,, { notes_movement1_part1 }
In general you should assign any repeated block of notes to a variable,
and then massage that variable as required. Here I've assumed the notes
are identical across parts apart from place and octave - that's the
impression you gave me? Like Pachelbel's Canon?
I play trombone, so it's important for me to massage *everything* into
concert pitch on input, and then massage it into whatever form is
appropriate on output. Consistency makes an easy life ...
Cheers,
Wol