New answers tagged notation
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Richard suggested that I convert my comment to an answer. Most of the key points are well addressed elsewhere, but I will repeat them here for the sake of completeness.
is there a good use case for using the C clef?
Absolutely. The problem is that keyboard culture has evolved to the point that the benefits of using C clefs are seen to be outweighed by ...
11
Pianists don't read C clefs. A great majority flatly don't know how, and most of the ones that can (because they play an instrument that reads them) are completely unpracticed at it for piano. It's only the rare person who regularly sight-reduces orchestral scores on piano who would be able to play this.
Don't ever use 8va in bass clef or 8vb in treble, as ...
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I don't think a C-clef is necessary.
Consider using the treble clef for the top staff, and leaving the upper voice here.
Put the middle voice with the lower, in the bottom staff in bass clef.
If the middle voice gets very high, you can move it from the bottom staff to the top staff.
This gives at most two ledger lines, which is not many at all.
If you think ...
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A C clef is unusual for piano. A C clef is also only one note below treble clef written 8vb or one note above bass clef written 8va. If you want to avoid ledger lines I think choice #2 is better since you don’t want 8ve symbols between the staffs (you learn something new every day @MattPutnam). Having your music played properly and written in a way that is ...
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The reason to write in C clef is the one you've come up with: the notes fit better on the staff. That's how clefs came into being — so that the core range of a particular voice (or instrument) fits nicely within five lines and spaces.
Piano music doesn't use C clef, and pianists will snarl at you for using it, though some are able to read it — usually ...
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It means that the very first time that measure is played, it's played with the non-parenthesized notation. On any subsequent visits to that measure, it's played according to the parenthesized notation.
There's no special name for this instruction, but it serves a similar purpose to writing separate "endings":
X: 1
T: First and second "endings&...
2
The reason the notes and time signature seem not to match up is that there are two separate "voices" happening simultaneously. This idea is discussed in Too many notes in this measure and linked Q&A.
To identify the two voices, just know that the dotted quarter notes are one voice, and the eighth rests/notes are the other.
GuitarPro allows ...
0
The subdivisions work the same way as they normally do, but the thirty-second notes are divisions of the subdivisions
At very slow tempi the key is to make your counts fractions of a beat. I count this piece with one count for every half beat (so I'm counting in eighths). The 32nd notes then become a subdivision of the count:
1 (2) (3) a 4 a 5 (6) 7 (8)
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No.
They are completely different. A bass clef is a music symbol, and a question mark is a punctuation mark.
The bass clef is a symbol that indicates low pitched notes. The bass clef is placed at the beginning of a music staff to indicate that the following notes are written in the bass clef. It is also called the F-clef because it originated from a fancy ...
1
I want to thank everyone for their answers and help and I am sorry about being late with getting back with you. What I actually ending up doing was adding a variable above all of the rest that had the "silent voice" with all of the break information in it, like this:
systeminfo = { \new Voice {
s1*8 \break
s1*7 \break
s1*...
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I'd like to supplement the reasoning behind this:
Note heads take space, and chords are typically sharing the stem or in absence of one are placed above each other.
If the note heads would overlap (due to very small interval between them) the first remedy is, to keep the note stem common and imagine one note head pushed to the other side of the stem (see ...
5
They should be played together. They're just spaced oddly like that to accommodate the presence of both E and E#.
The reason it's E and E# (as opposed to, say, E and F) is because of the previous E-F# dyad. For the notation in question, the E is a repeat of the previous E, and the E# is the lower neighbor to the F#s on either side.
Looking at it as two ...
2
In addition to Ramillies's great answer, a similar tool that may be helpful is specifying how many systems you want on your page. In your paper block, include systems-per-page = #4, for example, to have exactly four systems on each page. But this can be problematic depending on the nature of your score: if the instrumentation changes often from dense to ...
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A \break or \noBreak in any voice affects the whole system. I just have a special variable in all of my Lilypond files that contains only spacer rests with those breaks set up, and I put it as a voice into one of my staves (it doesn't matter which one it is). Here's a lilybin example: http://lilybin.com/walvlh/1 .
By the way, I'd say it's a good idea to ...
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I'm not sure why you ask the question.
The first two examples use rests within the first five bars. Those are rests within the first few phrases of music. That fits my basic expectations for a sung melody.
The third example of guitar tab I won't bother with, sources like that I would never rely on for good notation. Tab is notorious for not indicating rhythm ...
3
It's important to avoid confusion between an original score and the common performance.
First of all, the parts you provided are most certainly taken from original written material of the author (or copyist), they are not based on performances.
When you say something like "it is obviously a half note with a half-note rest" you are basing that ...
1
It's not an implied difference.
It's specified in the time signature.
You have to learn to read time signature. They are not self explanatory.
The tip off is in the top number. Basically, if it's a multiple of 3, and the bottom number is 8, then it's compound time and the beat is subdivided by three.
The problem with your example of eighth notes in 6/8 and 3/...
4
The answer to both questions is the same: it's understanding meter
Meter is the pattern of accented and unaccented beats. Both music and poetry have meter: RO-ses are RED has a pattern of one accent followed by two unaccented syllables; i WISH i KNEW how LONG has a pattern of one unaccented and one accented syllable.
In poetry there are lots of different ...
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Y0u are quite correct that, shown just this, we have no way of telling whether 2+2+2 (3/4) or 3+3 (6/8) grouping is required.
And that is why we have time signatures!
The 3/4 time signature tells us it's 2+2+2.
And, to make it even clearer, we'd normally write it like this.
For 3+3 we use a 6/8 time signature and this grouping.
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Let's assume your problem is not the differentiation of the six 8th-notes in a 3/4 time compared with the six 8th-notes in 6/8. (3/4 you count 1 a 2 a 3 a, 6/8 time you will count 1 2 3 4 5 6.
I think the question is how to differentiate a 6/8 from to bars of3/4, isn't it?
The problem is actually that it isn't always clear even to the composer to decide ...
2
However, other than people telling me this, I see no way that someone
would be able to know this just by looking at the music.
Of course! Musical notation is written language used by people in a culture. Did you learn to read text by looking at text, without actually speaking any language or meeting any speakers of any language?
It's about culture, ...
2
'I see no way that someone would be able to know this just by looking at the music.' The simple answer here is to look at the time signature.
3/4 and 6/8 look very different from each other! That's because they are! And playing your example would come out differently. The 6/8 tune would have an empahsis on the first note (like most music) but also on the ...
-1
One difference with compound time signatures is that instead of counting beats, we count pulses.
In compound time signatures there are three pulses to a beat, whereas in simple time signature there are only two.
This is represented as a clear visual difference by the beaming; we connect the flags of the pulses into beams, and we do this according to the ...
4
When you are defining a non-musical piece of script you often have to wrap it in a markup. Nesting markups is fine.
I don't know what version you are running, but this seems to work in version 2.19:
\version "2.19.48"
koronsymboldraw = \markup {
\override #'(thickness . 1.5) {
\overlay {
\draw-line #'(-.7 . .4)
...
1
The part that probably isn't clear - and may be played wrong in the Youtude video - is the prelude is actually three separate "voices."
Superficially it looks like a bunch of rolled chords, arpeggios. But it's actually like a trio, like three people singing separate parts. In technical terms we would say there is counterpoint between the three ...
2
I don't think the confusion is your basic understanding of meters and time signatures, but probably how you are counting aloud with syllables.
In simple time signatures - those that subdivide the beat by 2 - it's the note value that gets the beat. Ex...
4 (four beats per measure)
4 (quarter note gets the beat)
In compound time - those that subdivide the ...
4
After all, if it's only going to make a small difference in how I read
and no difference in how I play the song or count, then what's the
point of the bottom number?
The point is, you have to write SOMETHING there, or otherwise the top number doesn't mean ANYTHING.
It's about culture, conventions, tradition and language. Not natural science, laboratory ...
4
The other important information that the "denominator" of a time signature conveys is the beat in relation to other sections of the music. The meter of a piece does not have to remain constant, and as an example, it is possible to go from 4/4 to 3/8. In that case, the new time signature uses the eighth note as its beat for a triple meter, and the ...
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I believe there are fundamentally 2 main reasons I can think of:
historically, the tempo was not strict as it has been considered in the last 2-3 centuries, and it was usually decided based on the time signature; so, for instance, 3/8 was considerably faster than 3/4, and that's usually true even for today's music: if the fraction has a larger denominator, ...
3
When counting with the system you're using, the beat is always the whole number.
X/2 time: minim = 1 2 3 ...; crotchet = 1 & 2 & ...; quaver = 1 e & a 2 e & a ....
X/4 time: crotchet = 1 2 3 ...; quavers = 1 & 2 & ...; semiquavers = 1 e & a 2 e & a ....
X/8 time: quaver = 1 2 3 ...; semiquaver = 1 & 2 & ...; ...
1
“A stitch in [musical] time saves nine.”
I think this saying applies equally as well to clothing as to sheet music. The title of this question is, “Can someone tell me what this is?” And to that question, I can confidently answer, “Pretty poorly written.” *
To support my claim, I submit the comments from the arranger who is named in that picture:
Currently, ...
1
The note values in the first measure are:
beat 1: eighth note thirty-second rest dotted sixteenth note
beat 2: two sixteenth notes sixteenth note triplet
beat 3: quarter note
Measure 6 contains the same rhythm.
The line below the notes is a sustain pedal marking.
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The asterisk shows where the sustain pedal should be lifted after an earlier (pedal) marking
1
As it is written the 2nd must be a dotted 16th note succeeding an 8th note and a 32nd rest.
You can also chose a value pf a 16th - but the rest after the 1st note should be a 16th, then everything will fit well, if played rubato.
The line below probably means 8va up or could mean pedal, but the should be a break between the phrases.
The b in bar 6 belongs ...
8
Assuming the source is the following:
There are a couple of notes that are not there: the first Eb, and the first F in the sixth bar.
In both cases, those two notes should be played as the sixth thirtysecond of the first beat (the dot for the first E is partially hidden), just after the first 32nd of the second eight; but, ...
3
A hooked bracket end indicates that the music repeats back. An open end indicates that it carries on. I'd never really thought about the hooked end for a short 'last time bar' that concludes a piece, but it makes sense, and a quick trawl through some printed song copies confirms that it's generally done. Note that the bracket gets a hook because the ...
5
It's an ottava-line. Or shorter: an 8va line. It means you should play those notes one octave higher than notated.
There's also an 8vb-line (ottava bassa) to play the notes an octave lower, which is drawn underneath the staff.
And then there's the same for 2 octaves too: 15ma and 15mb
Which stands for 'quindicessima' and 'quindicessima bassa' or a 15th up or ...
8
Closing the last volta bracket is unnecessary and can be confusing (except, as Gould suggests, when there is a short bracket at the very end of a piece).
In your arrangement, you could get away with the closed voltas in m.39 and m.73 because they are ending a section, but it's better without. The one at m.87 is wrong.
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By convention, a square fermata has a longer duration than a rounded fermata.
It's not "upside down". Traditional notation convention usually tries to put the fermata over the note head, rather than the note stem. If the note is stemmed-down, them the fermata goes over the notehead, and the fermata dot will be below the fermata line.
If the note ...
2
What I'm curious about is that the sound being two octaves up means it should be notated (at least, with the notation I've most commonly seen albeit as a cellist) like this:
At least, unless a chord is intended, which wouldn't make a lot of sense considering it would imply a fingered open C string.
My opinion is subjective, since all we have to go on is ...
2
It appears that there is no definitively correct answer, with various sources indicating different approaches. So I submit the following argument for the use of accidentals for D Dorian, G mixolydian etc. as pure opinion with no claim to authority.
The most important information to immediately glean from a key signature, it would seem to me, would be tonal ...
2
As far as written systems go, the closest you'll get to a single-character notation for the entire chromatic scale is the numeric system in Dom's answer, generally notated as 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 T E.
For spoken letter-names incorporating a single syllable, the most common system I've encountered is adding "-sh" for sharps and "-f" for ...
1
I faced the same problem, was very frustrated, and thus created a new Musical Note - Voice System that is very simple to use, solving this problem without creating any confusion. The link to the full explanation is
. Key points are below:
New Musical Note – Voice System:
Voices of accidental notes are based on their natural ...
3
According to section 4.19 Annotations of the ABC Standard, you can place parentheses around a note with the following code:
"<(" ">)" C
For example,
X:0
M:none
K:none
"<("">)"C2
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