On Thu 26 Apr 2018 at 20:54:57 (+0200), address@hidden wrote:
Yes, this is exactly what I do, even if I did not want to make my
snippet too complicated by introducing also the piano staff. You
could of course use four staves, but in real life often two staves
are used with two voices in each. Often however life is not that
simple, there are more than four voices: first and second soprano,
first and second alto etc.
I'm losing count, perhaps because SATB was mentioned. I assume your
example is for SA on one staff, so the suggestion is to expand to
two staves, S and A. More staves than that would only be required
where the rhythms are different between firsts and seconds, or there's
a lot of part-crossing, etc.
And it is in these cases the shown
situation arises. Sometimes e.g. second soprano is singing at the
same pitch as first alto. In order to make reading the notes as
simple as possible one wants to have their notes separated, and the
initially described situation arises.
I don't think your layout adds any clarity for the singers, just to
avoid having to look at the stems carefully. And placing the lyrics
(even where identical between parts) will be more involved because
they will lie under only one of the chords, as shown.
So, why can't I produce a note
image like this (produced in GIMP, since I do not know how to do it
in LilyPond)?:
It's often difficult to make LP break conventions because there's a
lot of knowledge built in to the program. I can suggest one method
to achieve the layout you want just by lying about the chords'
simultaneity. As shown, you can make the lie as small as you like
(because the offset is limited by the size of the glyphs) which means
that any MIDI file will sound quite adequate for proofing the music.
Cheers,
David.