Re: different pitches with the same rhythm

[Mats Bengtsson]

Rune Zedeler wrote:
> Stefan Thomas skrev:
> > as far as I understood this topic, one must have experiences with
> > writing programs.
>
> Not at all.
> But one of the great things about lilypond is that /if/ you do have 
> experience with writing programs then you can "take the experience to 
> a whole new level".
> The topic of this thread is about how to do some special task 
> automatically - in this case how to make lilypond automatically use 
> the same rhythm for different pitches. It is absolutely not neccesary 
> to be able to implement things like this in order to use lilypond for 
> writing music.
In addition, you typically don't need any specific competence to use 
these advanced
solutions. It's just to copy a number of more or less incomprensible 
lines into your
own file and then use the new features defined in these lines of code, 
just as if
they had been built into LilyPond. However, this requires that the 
hackers are also
able to add comments and explanations on what should just be copied 
verbatim and
what is specific to the specific piece and also how the extra functions 
are used.
In the particular example they are discussing, I'm afraid that such 
explanations are
more or less missing. The basic idea is that you can typeset the famous 
Bach prelude
by just specifying the pitches for each measure like

\pat {c e g c' e' }
\pat {c d a d' f' }

Another nice feature about LilyPond is that there's a fairly large group 
of people who
follow the mailing lists and are willing to help, so when you have a 
need for some
more or less strange typesetting convention or whatever, you can send an 
email
to the mailing list and often you are lucky enough that some kind soul 
finds the
question intriguing enough to spend some minutes on inventing a clever 
solution,
which, again, you can use without having to understand any details on how it
really works.

   /Mats