Hi Jan,
But it only works if there's no clash with the time signature. So you
can have three arguments in a 3/4 or 3/2 or 6/8 but not in a 4/4.
Conversely, you can have four tremolo pitches in a 4/4 but not 3 -- at
least not without the kind of hack devised by Lukas in the first
response to my email.
And then again, to do so without generating warnings from LP, I
suppose you would indeed have to modify tremolo properties on a more
fundamental level. That's currently beyond my LP knowledge, however.
I think we needn't worry too much about that warning: It states that
some calculation of stem lengths (which make sense for the "c32 g f"
expression if taken without the \repeat tremolo) yields an unlikely
value. I don't understand the internals at the moment, and I agree that
it would be nice to have a solution that does not trigger warnings, but
I wouldn't mind just suppressing the warning.
Thanks to Aaron Hill, there's even a nice way to suppress the right
amount (3) of expected instances of that warning (taken from
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2019-09/msg00326.html).
So, what about:
\version "2.22.0"
#(define ly:expect-warning-times
(lambda args
(for-each (lambda _ (apply ly:expect-warning (cdr args)))
(iota (car args)))))
\new Staff \relative {
a'4 b c d
\omit Dots
\once\override Beam.positions = #'(2 . 1)
#(ly:expect-warning-times 3 "weird stem size, check for narrow beams")
\repeat tremolo 16 { { c32*2/3 g f } }
\undo\omit Dots
a4 b c d
}
I'm not even convinced that I would call this solution a "hack" (of
course it's no use arguing about that term):
- It is the correct music (try exchanging "tremolo" by "unfold"!).
- The dots that I had to suppress manually actually make sense: 16
groups of notes consisting of three 32's each do amount to 3*16/32 = 3/2
of a whole measure, after all. So, what we generate is a 1.*2/3, and I
don't mind having to tell LilyPond explicitly to engrave this by just
omitting the dot.
- But I concede that LilyPond's default positioning of the beams isn't
good enough. That might qualify as a bug, and the fact that manually
supplying the placement triggers a warning doesn't help things - and of
course having to suppress a warning is a bit hack-ish... :-)
I think what I want to say is that none of this involves, for example,
deviating from the actual semantics of entered music ("hijacking
staccato dots and turning them into flower-symbols"), or explicitly
abusing side-effects of commands, etc. Instead, we write the actual
music we want to hear and force-set only those layout parameters that
LilyPond isn't at the moment ready to supply automagically.
Lukas
