How to write notes start in a partial bar

[YesGH]

Some score start in a partial bar and end with it. like 5 | 5 5 5 5 | .... | 5 5 5 |

the lilypond command \partial 4 cann't work in that.

[ssb22]

The English word I was taught for this was "anacrusis". I heard that in America it is sometimes called "pickup".

jianpu-ly documentation has this example:

Time signature with quaver anacrusis (8th-note pickup): 4/4,8

So in your example it would be 4/4,4

I'm not sure why the Lilypond command is called \partial as I've not heard this in English. We could add more to the label of that example to say "partial" as well as "anacrusis" and "pickup" (as it seems at least some people don't know it's called "anacrusis" or "pickup" but do know the word "partial") but I was trying to avoid making it too wordy!

Incidentally, from the jianpu-ly web page I link to a Chinese summary of the instructions but this is now out of date and it does not include the anacrusis example. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out who wrote it or how to contact them. If you are able to contact them, I would like to ask permission to bring that translation into the upstream project and then we can update it. Or maybe we should just make our own translation from scratch that has permission to be included upstream. I'd be tempted to put the Chinese directly after the English of each item—that way we're less likely to forget to update both languages when we make changes.

[ssb22]

I think anacrusis bar is 弱起小节 in Chinese. (I could do all the translation myself but it would likely be better if a real Chinese musician were involved...)

[YesGH]

In English , anacrusis and upbeat both are ok, maybe upbeat is better, for Chinese 不完整小节 or 不完全小节，we call it 弱起小节 because the normal bar start with a strong(强拍) and there are English old songs start from upbeat, I've just took same photo from a old music book, very old maybe.

[YesGH]

and I guess the lilypond use \partial mean 不完整

[YesGH]

"Anacrusis" is maybe very formal word that I find it in a college level dictionary and wiki. Upbeat and downbeat (弱拍、强拍) are easy to understand acoustically and, whole and partial (完整、不完整) to visual.

[YesGH]

Time signature with quaver anacrusis (8th-note pickup): 4/4,8

Thanks, I got it.

Maybe another choice can provide: do a bar checking for several notes from begin, if a partial bar line is met putting the \partial command accordingly; if not, doing things as usual. ( in Lilypond one should write \partial cammand manually, is not so perfect )

[ssb22]

That won't pick up all of them. For example, Mildred and Patty Hill's "Good Morning To You" (now popularly known as "Happy Birthday") has a 1-beat anacrusis, but the badly-done mxl file of it tested in #72 does not, and no bar-check logic would fix that because the notes still fit in the bars even when shifted by 1 beat.

Also, we have to strike a balance between auto correcting errors and saying "hey, you need to check this". In the 1990s there were some spelling checkers that automatically substituted the most likely edit, and it turned the composer's name "Dom G Murray" into "Doom G Murky" on a Society of Recorder Players programme. We shouldn't just automatically "fix" everything....