Now that I’m playing more tuba, for a lot of the band pieces, it means it is ideal to have both a tuba score and a string bass score. I’m getting better at transposing up or down an octave at sight but there are points when I need to make a sudden shift. For example, the lowest note I can safely hit on my Eb tuba is G below the bass clef (G1) and even that tends to come out as an indistinct parp. Some of the music sounds better if I just read the string bass part without transposing but there I hit another problem – I can safely hit Bb3 and I’m working on stretching up to Eb4 but although many electric bass stay within that range, they can reach higher (C5, rarely, but F4 or thereabouts more often). What I want is an easy way to generate scores for both instruments with minimal additional work.

I’m using LilyPond for my concert band scores and it looks like the tags feature may do the trick for now. I need to try it in practice and see if it stretches far enough or feels annoying. For example, I’m not sure if I can use it to automatically switch the instrument name and my testing so far suggests I need to make sure that each snippet ends on the same pitch or subsequent notes will be too high or too low. If it doesn’t do what I need then I might have to resort to using something like Python to knock up a simple pre-processor that can generate either a string bass or tuba edition from a source file and a couple of parallel arrays (perhaps even stored in the same source).

Easy does it though and I will see how far I can get with a pure LilyPond approach first.