An Update, an Announcement, and a protip for Fasola Typesetting in Lilypond

Below, I'm going to spend some time detailing the technical steps to getting the typesetting program Lilypond to output typeset music in fasola notation. But first, a quick update and an announcement:

-All psalms have been assigned a text
-8 texts are still awaiting to be paired with a tune
-174 tunes have been typeset

As you can see, the first edition is rapidly approaching completion! Accordingly, the printing stage of preparation is coming soon, as well. To help defray the costs involved with this, I'll be launching a Kickstarter for the project within the next several weeks. There will be equitable rewards for those who are willing to pledge funding for the project -- more details and a link to the campaign will be posted within the next week.

On to the technical stuff of even more limited interest:

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For a long time, I was a devotee of one of the expensive name-brand music notation software programs, but several years ago when I began to do more composing in the fasola idiom, I could not figure out how to get the program I was accustomed to to output shaped notation. I do believe that it can be done, and I know that the other major expensive name-brand music notation software program can be made to do it, but I didn't want to spend the time or money to learn a new program.

So, I made the leap to Lilypond, and because of my modest computer skills, elected to use the WYSIWYG front-end client Denemo. It has most of functionalities of the expensive name-brand guys, and is actually even more flexible in many ways (albeit a bit buggier than others). Most of all, it is very easy to make it to output typeset music in fasola shapes -- or, at least it is once you know what you're doing. While I'm guessing this won't be of immediate interest to many of the readers who came to this place organically, I'm hoping maybe it will spare some soul searching Google for "HOW TO PUT FASOLA SHAPES INTO LILYPOND OR DENEMO" a bit of head-scratching and hair-pulling. So, if you found your way here in that way, fret no more and read on.

Steps (if you're using denemo):

1. Typeset your music, either using raw Lilypond input or a client like Denemo. A note if you're using Denemo: be sure that if you're typesetting a minor tune that you input the key as that key's relative major. In other words, if you're working with a tune in e minor (one sharp), tell Denemo that it's in G major (also one sharp) -- otherwise, the shapes will not be appended to the correct pitches. Note that this is only for minor tunes; major tunes should be input as expected.

2. Export your tune as a Lilypond file. If you use the  "quick export" function in Denemo, it outputs it to the same file location with the same file name, except as a .ly file

3.Navigate to the new .ly file and open it in a text editor (e.g., notepad on Windows). Scroll down until you see "MvmntIVoiceI = {", as shown below:

-After that bit of text and before the music itself, insert the following:

\sacredHarpHeads \set shapeNoteStyles = ##(fa #f la fa #f la mi)

-The result should look like this:



Note that you'll need to copy the line above into each section that says "MvmntIVoiceX" -- there will be one such section for each voice part in the tune. Lilypond will only typeset shapes for the voices that have the line above copied into them.

That's it -- save the .ly file, run it in lilypond, and if you've done everything correctly, you should have a new typeset fasola tune!

Let me know in the comments below if you're having any trouble with the above, and I'll try to help(??)!