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Hoots : How to write a pickup measure with 5/16 duration in Lilypond? I'm trying to write sheet music for a piece with a pickup measure of 5 sixteenth notes. Lilypond has the partial command for this, but it only accepts a single - freshhoot.com

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How to write a pickup measure with 5/16 duration in Lilypond?
I'm trying to write sheet music for a piece with a pickup measure of 5 sixteenth notes. Lilypond has the partial command for this, but it only accepts a single duration. That duration may be dotted, but that doesn't help since I need 5 notes, not 3, 6 or 7.
I've tried various combinations of partials, e.g. using the command twice:
version "2.16.0"

relative c'' {
key g major
partial 4 partial 16 g16 g fis d b | e2
}

which produces a barcheck warning

warning: barcheck failed at: 1/4
partial 4 partial 16 g16 g fis d b
| e2

and a wrong result:

I've tried other things like partial { 4 16 } or partial 4~16 but nothing seems to work; either the pickup measure is ignored or it has a wrong length.
Is there any solution for this? I don't want to use a pickup measure of one half note with 3 sixteenth rests.


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I've found one workaround, but I'm not sure I really like it since the sum of the partial durations is longer than the actual pickup measure:
version "2.16.0"

relative c'' {
key g major
partial 4 g16 partial 4 g fis d b | e2
}

and Lilypond warns about this:

trying to use partial after the start of a piece
partial 4 g16
partial 4 g fis d b | e2

but the result is correct:

Using partial 4 g16 g fis d partial 16 b | e2 instead doesn't work properly, since it inserts a bar line after the d already (and produces a warning in the compiler):

I'm really interested in a better solution (if it exists)!


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partial 16*5. Some people prefer writing partial 1*5/16 which scales partial 1 by the fraction 5/16, but I'd lean towards the simpler version.


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