Re: Setting relative pitch as a global declaration?

[Wols Lists]

On 09/02/2022 07:16, Alasdair McAndrew wrote:
> I'm sorry about all these damn-fool queries of mine; I promise to go 
> back under my rock soon.  Anyway:
> In the current 18th century suite I'm typesetting (for two treble 
> instruments without bass), there is a separate variable (containing the 
> notes) for each part of each movement.  Then there are global 
> declarations about the instruments, and the key and time-signature of 
> each movement; and these are all brought together in score blocks.
>
> The one thing I don't know how to do is to declare the relative pitch 
> globally.  Thus, each music variable looks like
>
> movement1_part1 = \new Voice \relative c'' { notes, notes, and more notes }
>
> The difficulty is that I want to re-set the second part for a bass 
> instrument, so it might start off as
>
> movement1_part2 = \new Voice \relative c { notes, notes, and more notes }
>
> Currently this means changing the relative pitch for each movement 
> individually.  It would be much more efficient to be able to do this 
> just once at the beginning, with an appropriate global declaration.  Can 
> this be done?  Is there a way to set the relative pitch of some music in 
> a \global block?
>
> (Note, I have indeed RTFM, but it's quite hard - even with the search 
> function - to find answers to this, or examples of such use.  Hence this 
> message...)
I don't know any way of doing what you want HOW you want. However, in 
the modern world, I have to do a lot of this sort of thing with \transpose.

So what I'd do is

notes_movement1_part1 = \relative c'' { notes, notes, and more notes }

movement1_part1 = \new Voice \relative c'' { notes_movement1_part1 }

movement1_part2 = \new Voice \transpose c c,, { notes_movement1_part1 }

In general you should assign any repeated block of notes to a variable, 
and then massage that variable as required. Here I've assumed the notes 
are identical across parts apart from place and octave - that's the 
impression you gave me? Like Pachelbel's Canon?

I play trombone, so it's important for me to massage *everything* into 
concert pitch on input, and then massage it into whatever form is 
appropriate on output. Consistency makes an easy life ...

Cheers,
Wol