Today I’ve mainly been getting ready for tonight’s String Project gig. Well, that and chopping and sawing more firewood to take advantage of the clear blue skies that came after the morning deluge. Getting ready for the gig involves practising the songs, particularly the sharp corners that sometimes trip me up, and also tidying up my scores so that rather than playing from a sheet covered with scribbles, I’ve got a beautifully clear and accurate piece of notation to work from.

Lilypond is still my tool of choice but I’ve recently also been making use of a program called Frescobaldi, which Magnus mentioned on his blog a few months ago. This is excellent for spot checks as it puts markup and output side by side with a link between the two. I can click on the note I’m interested in (eg. let’s move that F up an octave), which highlights it in the markup. I can then insert the characters needed to shift the note and also drop back down to the existing octave where required and press Ctrl-M to check that I haven’t introduced any unintended side effects.

Once I’ve added my changes, I go back to the command line and run a script I wrote called lprender, which simply processes the file and creates a PDF output that also includes the date created, moving it to a separate directory. That’s something I devised when I was still going hardcore and sticking to pure Lilypond but, while I find many tasks don’t need a GUI, I am finding Frescobaldi to be a boon in making spot corrections.