Tag Archives: notation

Hopping Around the LilyPond

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I’ve been experimenting recently with the open source music notation software LilyPond (thanks CDM!). I had looked into it in 2005 or 2006 and couldn’t understand how it would be of much use to me at the time. I think I recognized the flexibility of LilyPond, but couldn’t justify learning a scripting language (programming language?) when Finale met most of my notation needs. Since then I’ve become increasingly frustrated with Finale–more reluctant than ever to shell out more money for another incremental upgrade that never seems to provide the features I need. At the same time I’ve become more interested in creating non-standard notation, and so I developed a workflow in which only bare bones musical notation was produced using Finale, with the rest of the layout work done in a graphic design program like Illustrator. I’ve also been working more with tablature for five-string banjo, which has never felt comfortable in Finale.

So when I came across LilyPond this time I immediately noticed the support for non-standard notation, everything from Gregorian chant notation to proportional notation found in contemporary music, and of course, tablature. I also saw examples of common (for me) notation tweaks and features such as staves without bar lines; staves in multiple, simultaneous time signatures (that align!); note heads without stems; staves without staff lines (blank staves); note clusters; quarter tones; various accidental-handling schemes, etc. More encouraging was the fact that these features, while not always highlighted, also weren’t buried in the back of the documentation and were presented as viable (even desirable) notational choices. And did I mention that the output looks amazing! LilyPond produces gorgeous scores.

With those encouraging signs I jumped right into the tutorial and quickly decided I would try to notate some of my songs for five-string banjo. After about about a week of daily half-hour sessions I had a usable score for “Born in the Desert” and a new found enthusiasm for LilyPond.


Download the score as a pdf file: born_in_the_desert.pdf
Download the score as a LilyPond .ly file: born_in_the_desert.ly

Working with LilyPond

LilyPond uses a scripting language for all input: there’s no GUI, no point-and-click, no pretty graphics. I suspect my initial reluctance to try LilyPond the first time around was largely a result of this structure. (“What? I have to type out a bunch of ASCII? And then compile it to see the result?”) After a short time with the language, however, I found I quite enjoyed working without a GUI. Here are a few reasons why:

WYSIWYM: LilyPond operates on a “What You See Is What You Mean” principle. I like the fact that I can encode the information that’s important to me separately from its presentation. Working with tablature provides a good example. In some tablature programs, your data only “looks” like actual notation. Behind the scenes it’s actually a collection of graphics commands and specifications–a drawing that resembles music. If you decide later to extract the notation, or even simply transpose it or try an alternate tuning, you quickly find you’re stuck; there’s no (musically significant) “there” there. In LilyPond, you encode the important data and then decide how to present it. If you later change your mind about the presentation, the original data is still around, preserved in a musically sensible manner.

Variables: I may be more of a programmer than I realize or admit to being, since I immediately grabbed on to the powerful options presented by variables. Anything that can be represented in LilyPond can be assigned to a variable: from a recurring rhythmic motive, to a sequence of pitches, to an entire staff of notation. This provides  composers with the ability to generate a personal “language” of modules.

I used two simple variables in the score for “Born in the Desert”. One holds a recurring “pinch” gesture that will be familiar to fingerpicking guitar and banjo players. I named it “pinch”

pinch =
{
< g’\5 d’ >8
}

This simply creates an eighth-note chord consisting of a d and g above middle c. The “\5” after the g tells LilyPond that this note belongs on the fifth string.

The other variable contains a similar sequence of notes, a sixteenth-note g on the fifth string played by the thumb followed by a d on the first string plucked by the index finger. I named this variable “ti” for thumb-index.

ti = {
g’16\5 d’
}

My use of these variables is far from earth-shattering but felt wonderfully convenient. Every time I needed to represent these gestures all I had to do was type \pinch or \ti.

Note to self: I enjoyed how useful writing comments to myself could be. If something wasn’t working exactly how I wanted it I could simply add a comment like “% ??? what’s going on here? why is the second verse not aligning the way I expect?” or “% FIX This bar may need to be transposed.” These kinds of placeholders are nothing special in a word-processing environment, but when working with a graphical notation tool I often resorted to maintaining a separate “to do” file that was clumsy to use since it required including wayfinders like: “violin part, page 6, bar 23, beat 1: …”

And here are a few frustrations with Lilypond, all having to do with its script-based nature:

“error: failed…”: Seemingly trivial lapses in syntax can produce disastrous results. More than once I forgot a curly-brace or a quote and witnessed a dismaying string of errors pop up in the console when I tried to compile the score. A little bit of code management and common sense goes a long way here, such as indenting blocks of code and adding plenty of comments. I also found working with LilyPond within jEdit provided excellent color-coding of syntax.

Move it!: Sometimes I wanted to nudge a notational element or move staves a bit closer together. With Finale or Sibelius there is often a simple click-and-drag solution. in LilyPond I was back to poring over the documentation to find the correct \override statement and which engraver to invoke. Sound tricky? It is. And for simple fixes it was frustrating (though I’m sure with time the simple \overrides would become second nature). The one consolation is that the same \override principles are used to move practically _anything_ in LilyPond, providing a degree of flexibility that Finale or Sibelius simply don’t offer.

LilyPond Life

My next step with LilyPond will be producing scores for more banjo tunes to be released in conjunction with my upcoming CD. I’m particularly interested to find out how flexible the tuning schemes for tablature can be. LilyPond’s banjo tablature supports a number of common tunings already. I wonder how will it handle the non-standard tunings in some of my pieces. Then I hope to tackle some of the more outlandish notational problems in my existing works that have previously prevented me from rendering them electronically.

Tablature Overtures

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A recent discussion on one of the clawhammer banjo lists touched on two perennial questions of tablature:

  1. Is it a substitute (or better) than learning a tune from a recording?
  2. Why are some tabs so hard to make sense of?

I’m not going to tackle the first one other than to say: both are useful, in my experience. But the second question got me thinking about the differences between tablature and other notation systems.

Tablature describes what to do, not what sound to produce

As someone who learned traditional western notation first, this was a revelation to me. Tablature seems more like a cousin to Labanotation or other dance notation systems than to traditional music notation. I think the possibilities of this type of notation are worth exploring in other musical contexts.

Why is this type of notation a good fit for the banjo? For another instrument (played in a traditional manner) describing physical action may be overkill. For example, each key on a piano produces a unique sound, so there’s no ambiguity when Common Practice music notation specifies a particular pitch. A few fingering notes about how to play the passage usually suffice. The banjo, among other instruments, can produce the same pitch in a number of different ways, so tab can greatly clarify the intended way to perform. This is especially important given multiple tunings that are common with old time banjo music.

(As an aside, I’ve often played around with “performing” the same tune using very different tunings. The motions are identical, but the resulting sound can be quite different. I recently read that gamelan musicians may play the same piece in a different tuning and will refer to the resulting music by a different name altogether.)

This action-oriented quality of tablature can also be an advantage for conveying stylistic aspects of a particular performer. For instance, certain passages may be just as easily performed using pull-offs or drop-thumb technique, so the choice of which to use can illuminate a particular performer’s approach. Of course, tablature is no better than any other notational system at conveying subtle aspects of style such as rhythmic feel or accent.

So again, why can it be hard to make sense of certain tablature? Because it describes what to do and not what sound to produce. If you don’t already know what a particular tune is supposed to sound like, you may have trouble decoding the tablature. And to make it even harder…

Tablature differentiates musical function even less than Common Practice notation

It’s usually easy to tell the intended function of each musical part in common practice notation such as melody vs. accompaniment or figure vs. ground. Sometimes these distinctions are accidental or stylistic. For example, melodies tend to involve the highest notes, and harmonies tend to be outlined by bass notes which are–not surprisingly–low, so the parts are often written on separate staves or their stems point in opposite directions. Foreground and background parts are often differentiated rhythmically and thus barred separately. Even when such rules break down, they often do so in a predictable fashion (i.e. the tenor line carries the melody in Shape Note singing). Or course, anyone who has looked at late-romantic or impressionistic piano music knows that ambiguity abounds even in Common Practice notation, especially the further the music itself gets from the Common Practice era.

Tablature is much less clear, even when given something as simple as an 8-bar, tonal fiddle tune. Of course, some gestures are easy to decode. The typical clawhammer bum-ditty is an obvious rhythm and harmonic filler, but even a string of 8th notes could be ambiguous, with some belonging squarely to the melody and others serving as decoration. Usually the notes played by the fifth string drone are a safe bet to belong to the accompaniment, but with “melodic” clawhammer styles you can no longer assume that activity on the fifth string is unrelated to the melody.

Now back to our original question: why are some tabs so hard to understand? Because with tablature, every action specified must be decoded at least twice: once into sound, and then that sound must be placed in a musical context.