Re: Independent rhythmic spacing between staves?

[Simon Albrecht]

On 22.10.2017 00:43, Saul Tobin wrote:
> In my current project, I have a situation where the piano has fast 
> arpeggios at the same time as the strings play a steady, slower rhythm 
> (see attached screenshot). My feeling is that the best looking 
> solution would be to temporarily sacrifice rhythmic alignment between 
> the piano part and the rest of the staves, in order to maintain 
> visually correct rhythmic spacing within the strings and the piano 
> part independently. Is there are way to accomplish such a thing in 
> Lilypond just for a measure or two? How would you deal with engraving 
> this sort of passage?

I don’t think LilyPond offers any sensible way of doing this. Maybe you 
could tamper with scaled durations.
The models for LilyPond’s engraving are from the heyday of hand-engraved 
music (c. 1860–1960), and in this typesetting style it is never a good 
idea to violate rules so blatantly in order to improve looks. It’s 
different with manuscript music, or e.g. early engravings until around 
1800. But it is quite typical for such rhythmic distortions to occur 
whenever a full score features much faster notes (e.g. harp glissandi) 
than the others.
However, you could much reduce horizontal spacing between the 32nd 
notes: 
<http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/horizontal-spacing-overview>.

Best, Simon

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