CDM’s next suggestion was the LilypondTool – a plugin for the Java based text editor jEdit. At the time (September 2013) installing Frescobaldi on a Mac was a somewhat complicated procedure (this has since changed – more on that later) which led me to explore other possibilities first. Frescobaldi, their first suggestion, is a program that integrates the text editor and PDF output into a Lilypond IDE. My first stop in the search for a better editing environment was following up on the suggestions made in Create Digital Music’s article on Lilypond. Having line numbers in your text editor can be helpful too, especially when fixing errors after compiling. TextEdit does the job just fine but it’s really useful to have a text editor with syntax highlighting as soon as things start to get a little more complicated. TextEdit on a Mac) you can get Lilypond to generate a PDF with music notation. Lilypond can be downloaded from the Lilypond website and using a basic text editor (e.g. And as I mentioned in my Surface Tension post the shift from text file to preview can even become a useful part of one’s workflow – providing a fresh view of your work, somewhat equivalent to printing something out in the old days. In my case I’ve been used to this generative step with the work I’ve done on my website over the years and given the advantages of having a plain text basis on which to build from it’s been an easy transition. Lilypond first has to compile your text file input before you can take a look at the results and this can take some getting used to. What’s different from a WYSIWYG notation program like Finale or Sibelius is the separation of input and output. The text file used to generate the notation can be seen below the Lilypond generated example. Take a look at the full Frère Jacques on the wikipedia to get a better idea of how it works. With a little practice one can ‘read’ the music just by looking at the text file. c4 d e c | c d e c | e f g2 | for example, where the 4 indicates a quarter note rhythm, the 2 a half note and the letters the common note names. The text file is human readable even though it doesn’t look anything like regular musical notation. Text files and musical notationĪs I mentioned in my previous post Lilypond is open source software that makes use of text files to generate musical notation. While so much of the technology we use attempts to cover up seams for the sake of convenience, diving into some of the more geeky aspects opens up for a more solid relationship with the tools we are using, ultimately placing us in a more powerful position. Getting those systems in place has certainly taken more time than had I used readymade out-of-the-box solutions, but my productivity (and delight in the process) has certainly increased as a result – something others have apparently experienced as well. Mandy’s essay pretty much sums up my experiences with building my own website (in my case with the help of the Kirby CMS – the details of which I can unfold on another occasion). And so the process for how that writing comes together, and the tools I use to build it, are as important to me as the rhythm of any particular sentence. Writing here was never just about sharing my writing but also about building systems for that writing: systems that could enable a particular kind of writing, which may even be unique to me (or as unique as anything gets, anyway). Routines and tools do matter-not only for writers but for any skill or trade. “Questions about writers’ tools are both fascinating and repulsive”, she says, recognising the danger of fetishizing tools and in so doing procrastinating getting down to the writing itself.īut assuming we recognize that risk and take pains to avoid it, talking about our tools can be instructive. Mandy Brown has written a fine blog post outlining her relation to writing, technology and independent publishing. I thought that it might be worthwhile to write a little more about my own experiences with getting started with Lilypond in the hope that this might be useful to others interested in following a similar path. 19, 2014 18 min read Diving into the LilypondĪ few months ago I wrote a blog post enthusing over my newfound plain text/ markdown workflows and touched on a musical counterpart with a description of my first encounters with Lilypond notation software.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |