Bryan Creer wrote: >"Strike the concertina's melancholy string! >Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything!" > >W.S.Gilbert > >Laurie Griffiths said - > >>An instruction to play a note on fret 9 of the G string instead of the open >>E string is musically relevant. > >My concertina doesn't have E or G strings and I'm not playing top E on the G >string of my fiddle for anyone. > >>A difference between two pieces of notation is musically relevant if and >>only if it means they should sound different. > >This and the example imply that the instrument being played is relevant. >Wouldn't it be best to exclude instrument specific notation from abc? It >could get very messy if you don't.
That's a purist approach. While it would be nice to have a notation system uncluttered by instrument specific notation it would rule out a lot of useful stuff which is already in abc, e.g. the HP and Hp key signatures, u and v in fiddle music, and even [chords], since they are only relevant to polyphonic instruments. The difficulty is to know where to draw the line. Instrument-specific markings should not make it difficult to read or parse the abc. If Laurie wants to write something like "^F9S3"e in his music to indicate that the note is to be played at a particular point on the fingerboard I don't see why he shouldn't. The result _does_ sound different, and is relevant to a guitarist playing from the music, and although I doubt if anybody will ever write a player program capable of dealing with such subtleties, I can see that such hints could be useful to a program which generated tablature from abc. Having said that, it's clear that if he wanted to mark every note with fret/string markings, he ought to be using tablature in the first place, rather than abc. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
