I really think we're wasting a lot of time on this. The only use for it is to notate an odd chord or brief passage of double-stopping in a piece which is otherwise monophonic.
Anything more complex than this should always be notated using multivoice abc, which lets you define absolutely any time relationship you want between the notes and chords (different voices can even have different time signatures if necessary). Please let's just settle on one simple rule which involves the minimum change to existing practice and discuss something more profitable. I still favour the first-listed note rule (though it's not what my own program currently does). The 'add a length after the chord' proposal seems unnecessarily complicated, and is also ambiguous - by analogy with existing abc rules, adding '2' after the chord should make its length two default notes, but reading Toni Schilling's post it seems that it means to the chord length is to be double that of the first note (or was that of the shortest note?). Taking the shortest note as the length of the chord seems a little inflexible. If there's a problem differentiating between the melody note and the note which determines the length of the chord, or if you need a chord length which isn't actually represented among the selection of notes in the chord then you're definitely dealing with music which is too complex to represent this way, and you ought to be using multivoice, even if some of your voices are going to end up with lots of rests in them. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
