Realbook

A Realbook style collection of sheetmusic, created with lilypond.

Design Goals

• should not require any scripting or templating in addition to lilypond/guile
• should look as neat as the classics
• should be transposable (TODO)

Similar Projects

• Mark Veltzer's openbook is a very popular and versatile resource. I chose not to built upon it, because I did not like the idea of templating. As stated in my design goals, I want to achieve a lilypond only solution. However, for now I will not duplicate songs that are also contained in the openbook maually(!) myself. I have not yet looked into the generated lilypond files with respect to importing them verbosely, but that could be an option.

Prerequisites

• lilypond 2.18 or newer(?)
• make (optional)

Usage

Run lilypond -o realbook main.ly to create realbook.pdf containing all scores in the ./scores directory. Alternatively, run make realbook.

To add music, create a score in the ./scores directory, and include it in ./scores/all.ly.

TODO

Pull requests welcome.

• add LICENCE file
• create score overlay underneath header as in the Realbook
• create toc and title page
• substitute ./scores/all.ly by lisp function, collecting all scores in alphabetical order from ./scores directory
• allow easy transposition of all scores
• include source of each transcription in header/tagline if there are no legal issues with that
• test with newer lilypond version
• if there are no legal issues, publish realbook.pdf as artifact
• read scores location from environment variable and only default to ./scores
• default globally to \set chordChanges = ##t, i.e. omit redundant chords repetitions over more than one bar
• default globally to \numericTimeSignature, i.e. 4/4 measure as '4/4' instead of 'c)'
• dynamically expand alternatives on demand
• git commit hooks
  • lint
  • remove trailing whitespace
  • replace tabs
  • reindent
  • use formatter (lilypond?, frescobaldi?)
• build
  • midi
  • epub
  • mp3?
• create yeoman template for new scores, asking for:
  • title
  • composer
  • meter
  • measure
  • key
  • shape (e.g. AABA)

Credits

Many thanks to the kind and helpful lilypond community.

This project was largely based on and inspired by Leigh Verlag's blogpost