LaTeX and music

Some of you probably already know that I also play a lot of music. Playing music in my case also requires writing lead sheets similar to the ones in the Real Book (for which I use MuseScore) and similar to ones you find in any other song book. For the latter I use my leadsheets package with LaTeX.

With the latest update the leadsheets package now contains a small document class ([cci]leadsheet[/cci]) for creating single leadsheets. But – and that’s new: leadsheets now comes with the [cci]external[/cci] library. With this library it is possible to include leadsheet files created with the leadsheet class into a bigger file (maybe a song book or compilation of lead sheets) without having to remove the preamble of the single file! Of course this has a few caveats but it is very convenient at the same time!

One of my other music related packages, guitarchordschemes also got an update recently. Now stuff like the following is possible (have a look here for the code) – a ukulele chord diagram table:

We also now can do something like this (here’s the code):

Personally I don’t need those small chord diagrams. In fact I find them very distracting in song books. But it seems other people like them…

The two main new features demonstrated by the pictures are the possibility for rotation of the diagrams and the possibility for setting the number of displayed strings.