Re: Open string tunings for guitar

[David Kastrup]

Fulvio Turra <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all, I recently asked Francesco Bruni - an expert lilypond user and
> active contributor on this list - some help about how to transcribe guitar
> music (staff and tab) in some unorthodox tunings and he suggested to share
> these tunings with the list to see if there is some interest in them: I
> have to transcribe a bunch of guitar music compositions for a professional
> guitar player (and great friend of mine) who uses a lot of exotic guitar
> tunings; he'd like to publish a book and I offered my help with the
> transcriptions. I think this could be a great opportunity to show off that
> lilypond can do better (if not best) than Sibelius and Finale.

I think that extending the tunings for "unorthodox" tunings is pretty
pointless since that makes finding the needed information harder, and
since it results in basically random selection of predefined tunings.

The point here is more that it is _trivial_ to do your own tuning, by
writing something like

\new TabStaff \with { stringTunings = \stringTuning <c, g, d g b d'> }
{ ... }

It is much faster to write this down rather than searching through
preexisting tuning tables to find a particular unorthodox tuning.

Historically, custom tunings were trickier to do: that's why we have all
those tables.  But I don't think we should further extend them into the
obscure when it is easy enough to just do a custom tuning.

If you find the above too long, you can just do a shortcut definition,
like

\version "2.19.0"

tuning =
#(define-scheme-function (parser location tuning) (ly:music?)
  #{ \with { stringTunings = \stringTuning $tuning } #})

\new TabStaff \with \tuning <c' g' d g b d'>
{ <c' e' g'>
}


-- 
David Kastrup