To recap: 3 days ago I wrote (with this subject line) that I have a passage to set where one instrument (harpsichord) plays 8 bars in 4/4 time, consisting mainly of semiquavers (sixteenths). It has to be played in strict time at its own tempo (4 = 108), which is quicker than the rest of the orchestra is playing.
Although the harpsichord part must appear in the score, it is important that it is clear that it doesn't "fit" with the other instruments. It starts at a common barline, but thereafter it does its own thing, so the positioning of the notes in the score is merely a suggestion of what is going on: in performance it won't necessarily fit precisely as it is shown in the score, but it is not expected to. By using scaled durations etc. I can get roughly the effect I want. But is it spoiled by one thing: there is a 4/4 time signature in all instruments (including the harpsichord) at the beginning of the passage, but there are also a couple of further time changes in the orchestra only. It is easy enough to prevent these from appearing in the harpsichord part; but because Lilypond synchronises everything vertically (just as one wants it to 99.99% of the time) it ruins the effect. This is because there is a large gap between successive notes in the harpsichord to allow for the time signature displayed in all the other staves. I have not had any suggestions as to how I might get Lilypond to set the harpsichord part without regard to the spacing on the other lines; this strongly suggests that, as I suspected, it can't be done! (Although if anyone knows otherwise, I'd be glad to hear about it.) Meanwhile I have been trying another approach, which is to set the harpsichord part on its own, with line breaks at appropriate points (within bars) to suit the bar-end breaks in the orchestra score. I then save each line of this as a separate eps. file. In the main score I have a dummy stave above the string parts, and I attach the relevant file to a dummy note using \once \override TextScript.extra-offset = #'(-10 . -6) a'1*2 ^\markup \epsfile #X #120 "No16Harpsichord1.eps" The actual values required are found by trial and error. This promises to work, except for one problem. For some reason that I can't figure out, the spacing in the orchestra lines gets affected. As I increase the size of the image, the orchestra score either extends into the right-hand page margin or expands horizontally to force one or two bars on to the next page. There doesn't seem to be any direct relationship between where the right-hand edge of the image occurs and the point in the music of the main score that lies immediately below it. I have tried using \textLengthOff, but this does not help. Can somebody tell me what might be going on here, and perhaps how to get around the problem? David _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
