RLPF.ar

Switching over to Linux means losing Finale for music notation. I had heard rave reviews of Lilypond from other SuperCollider users, so I installed it along with a special-purpose editor named after the Italian early Baroque composer Frescobaldi. I didn't have time to try it until today, though -- the reason being that I want to give my first year students a cheat sheet for some common pop music drumming styles. (I will need to put it to more serious use for a new piece soon, though.)

Lilypond isn't a point-and-click notation editor. Rather, it's a markup language for (Western) music notation, in the same way that TeX is a markup language for typesetting. (TeX is still actively used in mathematics and the sciences, because nothing else matches its ability to typeset complex equations.) You write little bits of code describing what you want the output to be, and then Lilypond compiles it into a PDF.

\markup {
 \wordwrap { These beats came from the 'breaks' in funk records -- where the drummer would play a short solo. One of the classics is from The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother'. }
}

\score {
 \new DrumStaff <<
 \new DrumVoice {
 \voiceOne \drummode {
 \global
 % Drums follow here.
 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8
 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8
 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8
 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymr8 cymc4 cymr8
 }
 }
 \new DrumVoice {
 \voiceTwo \drummode {
 \global
 % Drums follow here.
 % bd sna hhc hh hhp hho cymc cymr
 bd8 bd8 sna8. sn16 r16 sn16 bd16 bd16 sn8. sn16
 bd8 bd8 sna8. sn16 r16 sn16 bd16 bd16 sn8. sn16
 bd8 bd8 sna8. sn16 r16 sn16 bd4 sn8
 r16 sn16 bd16 bd16 sna8. sn16 r16 sn16 cymc4 sn8
 }
 }
 >>
 \layout { }
}

My first impression? Wow! Really first rate -- spacing, beaming, all of it spot-on. (Flaws in this image come from scaling the picture down. At high resolution, it's perfect.) Having spent countless hours trying to coerce Finale into making the spacing look right and clicking into multiple layers of dialog boxes for fine adjustment, having it all exposed in plain text is a welcome relief.