Just under a year ago, I posted on the subject of pond-fu; learning the art of engraving music with Lilypond. Lilypond is a program that takes a piece of text and turns it into a musical score. I revisited those skills over Christmas and have picked them up again in the last week. Practise is definitely paying off and it only took me half an hour tonight to produce an arrangement of “Be Thou My Vision” for the youth band at church tomorrow, with simplified chords and the original 3/4 timing transposed into more “celtic” lilt (my version of this could be counted 123 123 12 and is a syncopated 4/4).

I wonder if I should post a few snippets of what I have learned recently? One of the factors that helped me speed up tonight (from couple of hours for eight bars last year to half an hour for 16 bars tonight) was having developed some templates that mean that I can get off to a running start? I might do that over the next few days. It probably won’t change the world but does at least mean I have a hope of clambering more quickly up the learning curve next time I return to the program after a long lay-off.