Hello Don, regarding your score of "Last Thing on My Mind", let me please give you some hints that make using musixlyr more fun.
You've used \empty{} in the lyrics wherever the text should skip over a
note. That's totally appropriate in the pickup bar since those notes are
really skipped over. But within a verse, skipping over a note is not
really what you do - instead, you span a syllable across multiple notes.
In musixlyr terms, this is expressed more appropriately by appending an
underscore to this syllable, e.g. "sand,_". This way is better also
because it left-justifies the syllable and draws an "extension
underline" to indicate the range of notes the syllable covers. To span
over more than two notes, just add further underscores (e.g. "mind__").
If the syllable is not the last one of a word, put the underscore(s)
in front of the hyphen (e.g. "stead_-i-ly").
You've used \empty{} many times to make verses 2-4 "silent" at the
chorus. It's much easier to reassign the lyrics to the music at the
point where the chorus begins, leaving only verse 1 active. This way,
the \setlyrics of verses 2-4 can simply end where the verses naturally
end. Furthermore, the single remaining line of text is then vertically
centered in the space of the four verses. You do that with the command
"\assignlyrics1{lesson1}%" just before the first note of the chorus.
As soon as the chorus lyrics are vertically centered around the verses,
you can even make the transition between them nicer by inserting a big
right brace. (This is admittedly quite tricky; see the attached complete
example for the code.)
On Mon, Nov 26, 2007 at 09:20:44PM +1100, Don Gingrich wrote:
> 1) Same problem with needing to force the measures per line and
> note to lyrics spacings more or less manually
That's a basic problem of musixlyr when the note spacing is generally
narrow and you have lots of text, i.e. few melismas. musixlyr has no
influence on MusiXTeX's spacing decisions - i.e. when the given notes
spacing is too tight for the lyrics to fit, everything is shifted
rightwards and looks more or less ugly. Your only chance to solve this
in a general way - i.e. without lots of manual corrections - is to
loosen the music spacing generously, utilizing the MusiXTeX commands
\mulooseness and/or \linegoal. If lyrics spacing is too narrow in a
certain portion of the piece only, you may also use \scale to widen up
the spacing only in that certain section. (Altering the spacing by
replacing, e.g, \Notes by \NOTes is rather not reasonable because their
effect is only relative to the spacing of the other notes.)
> [...]
> 3) It would have been nice if I could have worked out a way to
> reduce the inter-staff spacing for the chorus -- the musixlyr
> documentation seemed to suggest that using \rlap would fix this
> but either it only worked with the example provided or I've
> missed something. I did try \stoppiece - \contpiece but I
> was trying to put the chorus in a new lyric set -- I think
> I needed to use \resetlyrics, but I didn't realise this. I may
> try going back and having another try.
Sorry, these are misconceptions - neither \rlap nor \resetlyrics have
anything to do with vertical spacing. What you need here is
\staffbotmarg and/or \stafftopmarg to alter the spacing between systems,
maybe \lyrraise to raise or lower the chorus lyrics, and \atnextline to
synchronize such changes with the next line break.
> Now, "Last Thing..." is OK except that I've got a BIG black line at
> the end. I guess I could live with that. The lyric spacing still is
> a bit big, though.
Well, the black line is simply due to those two lines in your .tex file:
\NOTEs\Dsev\qu d\qu c\qu b\qu a\en\setvolta{1.-3}
and
\raiseguitar{30}
Both of them should be terminated with a % sign to avoid spurious
horizontal space.
To put most of that together, I've applied the mentioned changes to your
example and attach the changed version here.
Best regards,
Rainer
lesson-too-late-crd_changed.tex
Description: TeX document
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