John Walsh
| ... However, I think that a
| lot of the instrument specific--and other--notation could be introduced
| from the users end, if there just is sufficient flexibility in abc. (And
| there is, at least potentially.) For instance, suppose we had a
| generalization of the much-overused guitar-chord mechanism which would:
|
| (a) put arbitrary text over the staff
| (b) ditto under the staff
| (c) ditto over a note
| (d) ditto under a note
| (e) ditto in front and behind a note
| and which could
| (f) deal with fonts, and
| (g) have enough flexibility in positioning to
| keep things from overwriting each other, and even (heresy!) make them
| look nice.
...
| [Non-uilleann example: I've just been transcribing some tunes from
| Ryan's/Coles for John Chambers' project. These include fingering for the
| fiddle on some notes. I had to use guitar chords to stick this in, and, to
| be charitable, it looks awful. The numbers are too far from the notes,
| and often conflict with other markings on the same notes. I wouldn't put
| up with this for my own music, but this is John's project, so I can't use
| abc2mtex.]
I'd have to agree that putting fingerings in as "2" or "^2" doesn't
look pretty. I'd also note that it does give about the same look as
in the Ryan/Cole books, which is also not pretty. John Walsh has
mentioned to me that there is confusion in at least a few tunes
between a "3" as a fingering and a "3" as a triplet indicator. They
look the same in this collection. This confusion is only made worse
by the failure to use the usual bracket or slur-like marks above the
notes of a tuplet.
This is an interesting case, because we're once again dealing with an
important historical collection, and an ABC version should try to get
as close to it ("warts and all") as possible. So the ugliness of the
"3" as a fingering is excusable on the grounds that "Ryan did it that
way". We could even complain, with tongue firmly in cheek, that ABC
can't properly represent the confusion with a triplet, since ABC
forces us to write (3 for the latter. But somehow I think the
sticklers for historical accuracy wouldn't go quite this far.
BTW, the Ryan/Cole transcription has been going slowly, and I've been
thinking of publicising it a bit more to get a few more people doing
the tunes. Anyone here want to contribute? John Walsh has been doing
tunes in the usual way, emailing in batches of tunes. I've also been
experimenting with a web interface for entering the tunes, and it
could be fun to get a few more people using (and criticising) it.
It's also likely that random people have tunes from this collection
that they've transcribed. If so, would you like to send them to me?
One problem with Ryan/Cole is that tunes weren't numbered. The two
publications ordered the tunes differently, and so page numbers don't
work. Some titles are used more than once. And so on. This is a pain
if you're trying to make it easy to find a tune. As nearly as I can
tell, the title+rhythm combination is unique, so I've been using
that. Thus the file names:
IrishAmericanJig.abc
IrishAmericanReel.abc
MissJohnsonsHornpipe.abc
MissJohnsonsReel.abc
OurBoysJig.abc
OurBoysReel.abc
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