Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Tech Tools for Musicians - Lilypond

Musical scoring is a much needed evil. From trying to put together a lead sheet to a full up score, if you want to communicate with musicians, it is the best way. But my handwriting is terrible! You do not want to see a handwritten piece of music from me. So that is where software comes in. The full version of Finale (one of the premier notation software tools) is $450. Sometimes I just want to create a few lines of music for a student for free. But I want it to look good. Also the option of having TAB isn't bad either. It's this need that led me to Lilypond.

Lilypond at it's simplest is a text based generator for quality music scores. The upside is that it is open source. The downside is how you make a score. It is fully text based. But fear not. If you are a quick study, you will be making nice looking scores in no time.

For instance, say you wanted to create a simple line of music like this:

You would create a text file that looked something like this.
\version "2.13.3"
\score {
 \relative c' { c4 d e f  e d g a  c,8 d e f e d g a  c d e f e d g a }
}
Now before you freak out that this is impossible, lets break it down. The first line is simply the version of lilypond you are using. The next line is the begining of a new score. Then a line of notes. The \relative c' means that the notes are relative to middle C. Then as you write in notes it goes to the nearest pitched note. If you want to force it up or down an octave you use an apostrophe or a comma and you add a number behind notes to indicate their duration. the same duration is used on subsequent notes until a new duration is given.

Once you have Lilypond installed and you give this file a name like music.ly, all you have to do is double click the file and Lilypond will generate a PDF of your music. With a few extra commands, you can have it also generate svg, png or postscript.

You can see some examples of very complex scores at the Lilypond site.

There are many types of extras you can add to the score like:

\header {
title = "Practice Etude #1"
composer = "Johnny Matthews (1976-)"
}
\version "2.13.3"
melody = { c4 d e f e d g a c,8 d e f e d g a c d e f e d g a }
\score {
<< \new Staff \relative c {
   \clef "treble_8"  
  \melody  
 } 
 \new TabStaff \relative c {  
  \set TabStaff.minimumFret = #0
     \melody
   }
>>
}
\score {
<<
  \new Staff \relative c { 
   \clef "treble_8"
    \melody
   }
  \new TabStaff \relative c {
    \set TabStaff.minimumFret = #5 
    \melody 
  }
>>
}

and here is the result:


As you can see I've reused the melody 4 times, 2 times in music and 2 times in TAB. I altered the second line of TAB to have a minimum fret of 5. Lilypond does the fingering for me. You can override the fingering if you really want to. The possibilities are really quite extreme. There are tons of features and settings. From articulations, chords names, chord charts, lyrics, altered note heads (for percussion notation), we have barely scratched the surface here.

Stay tuned for some more in depth tutorials on using Lilypond.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Pizza Night

Recently a co-worker of mine wrote about making pizza, and I was inspired to do the same.

If there is one food I love in most of it's forms, it's pizza. My family loves it as well. With 7 of us (including grandpa) we can go through a couple of large pizzas without too much trouble and at $10-$15 a pizza, ordering in is expensive. I enjoy cooking a good meal and so about 6 months ago I started looking up pizza on the internet. I found a dough recipe that sounded good and the same with the sauce. I have over time altered the recipe a bit and have come up with something that my family loves and is fun to make. Also, depending on the toppings, is very inexpensive.

The Dough

2 Cups Warm Water
1 Tablespoon Sugar
1 Tablespoon Salt
1 Tablespoon Olive Oil
4 1/2 to 5 Cups White Flour
(substitute 2 of the cups with whole wheat flour for a heartier dough)
1/2 Tsp dry yeast
Mix the water, sugar, salt, olive oil and 2 cups of flour till well mixed. Add 2 more cups flour about 1/2 cups at a time till it makes a sticky ball. Start kneading the dough adding a little flour at a time to keep the ball from sticking. Add the yeast and knead for about 10 minutes. Divide into 2 balls, and set them in a covered bowl for 1 to 2 hours.

The Sauce

2 Cans Tomato Sauce
1 Tablespoon Salt
3 Tablespoons Sugar
1 Tsp Olive Oil

Garlic Powder, Basil, Oregano, other Italian spices to taste.

Combine and bring to a boil for about 5 minutes. Cover and simmer on med-low for about 30-45 minutes.



Assembly

Preheat your oven and baking stone to 475.


Press dough ball into circle and use a rolling pin to extend it out to size (you can throw it if you so choose). Use corn meal to dust dough and place on stone. Add 1/2 the sauce, cheese and any other toppings you like. Cook for around 10-12 minutes on the middle rack. Watch closely so that you do not burn your cheese.


By the way if you are going to do this, I would recommend buying your cheese in bulk at Sam's Club. You can get a 20 cup bag of shredded mozzarella for about $8.50. That's really cheap compared to the little 2 cup bags of cheese you get at the grocery store for $3.00 or more each. That really brings the cost down. All in all you can make a couple large pizzas for only a few dollars each.