Re: [abcusers] Multivoice in ABC 2.0
There's nowhere in the tune body where you can place a single field and have it apply to all voices. There is nowhere in any ABC spec that explicitly allows that yet, but it is common for medleys to be made up of tunes by different composers or from different sources, so the informational fields should be permitted within a tune body as applying to all voices. (Having different voices by different composers is possible, as in some mediaeval music, but much less common). And of course P: needs to be like this, so that the playing order for multi-voice music can be controlled in an intuitively obvious way. It's hard to see how %%Bfly directives could be done any differently if more than one per tune were allowed - these have to start a line. And I don't see any other way you could get some effects, e.g. varying the slur curvature within a single piece (I spend more time faking that with a graphics editor than in compensating for any other missing feature in BarFly). - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the left hand is probably much of this. I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed. What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Multivoice in ABC 2.0
Jack Campin writes: | There's nowhere in the tune body where you can place a single | field and have it apply to all voices. | | There is nowhere in any ABC spec that explicitly allows that yet, | but it is common for medleys to be made up of tunes by different | composers or from different sources, so the informational fields | should be permitted within a tune body as applying to all voices. | (Having different voices by different composers is possible, as | in some mediaeval music, but much less common). Hmmm ... I have a fair number of examples of this in my music binders. It's especially common in my trad Scandinavian collection. This style has a lot of harmonies, but there seems to be an idea that harmony lines are supposed to be improvised. Writing down the tune is desirable; you want tunes to be fairly stable so that people can play a tune together. But writing down a harmony line seems to be something that is mostly for the benefit of newcomers to the music, to help them learn how to do harmonies. Anyway, it's not unusual to see pages with a melody line and a harmony line, each with someone's name attached. We don't seem to have a way for abc to express this cleanly. (I've also seen a few with multiple harmony lines, each with a different composer name. One problem this can cause is that newbies often think it's music for N voices. So they play all the harmonies together, and wonder why it sounds so bizarre. ;-) I'd think that the most obvious way would be for a C: line inside a part to apply to only that part. We already have a distinction between P: lines in the header and P: lines in the music; this would just add the same distinction to C: (and maybe O:) lines. This wouldn't really qualify as an extension of the abc syntax; it's more of a semantic point. We could make a similar point with lyrics, since it's not at all unusual for different verses to come from different sources. In general, abc's scoping rules are a bit vague. But then, this is also true for staff notation. -- O :#/ John Chambers + [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Jack Campin writes: | Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as | I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard | mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the | left hand is probably much of this. | | I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - | while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people | do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. | My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in | the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, | and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity | material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed. It has always seemed to me that musicians should react the other way. After all, right-handers who play stringed instruments always seem to want to use their left hand for the fingerboard. And if you're a keyboard player, I'd think you would of necessity be fairly ambidextrous. I usually put a mouse on whichever side is most convenient. I find that switching sides with the mouse doesn't take any thought; I just do it. This seems to surprise a lot of people when they notice it. But I'd think that a keyboard player would just react by asking What sort of keyboards do you play? | What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the | right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it | would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, a clever abc editor might have an option to keep track of the tonic from the K: lines, and map 1-7 to notes in the obvious way. You'd use 0 for a rest. Maybe you could use the + and - keys on the keypad to do octave shifts. Actually, you want lengths, too. So maybe you could use the shift key to select between 1-7 meaning notes and lengths. Then, with the left-hand shift key, you could enter notes and lengths entirely with the right hand. You'd still need to move your hand for bar lines, I suppose. It might be worth experimenting with. -- O :#/ John Chambers + [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Hello Everybody, Thanks for your input on keyboard layout. I see that I differ from other abc users in that I have opted to relearn how to type on the Dvorak keyboard, and that I avoid the usage of the mouse if at all possible. Keyboard shortcuts all the way, man. The Dvorak keyboard doesn't have the quality that all letters abcdefgh are keyed with the same hand. Of course, even with a qwerty keyboard, you still need the right hand for the |,[],: , characters, which are used quite frequently. Or is this what you used the mouse for? If having the right hand free for the mouse is important, the keys could be remapped so that all the frequently used characters, including |,[],:,, are on the left hand. This may even be better having all the letters abcdefg on one row. (Incidentally, Dvorak also designed keyboard layouts for people who only had control of one hand. They are now a standard part of Windows. Apparently people can type up to 55 wpm with these. I'd like to see a one handed person do that with qwerty.) For those who experimented with alternate keyboard layouts, and later switched back, how long did you try the alternate layouts? It took me about a month to learn Dvorak, and another 2 or so to reach a decent speed, but it was worth it. Might the difficulty have been that your brain was (soft)-wired for qwerty because it's all you've ever learned and it was hard to rewire to something else, rather than a difficulty inherent in the keyboard layout? Despite what some have said, other than the problem of our brains being softwired to type a certain way, I have a hard time believing that something more closely resembling a keyboard layout couldn't be better (in the long term at least) than something where the main keys used are laid out apparently randomly. If you were to design a layout to enter the tune part of an abc, without knowing where the pertinent letters are on a standard qwerty keyboard layout, would you put the letters where they currently are on a qwerty keyboard? Probably not. I assume that for most or all of you, though, entering abc tunes does not make up the bulk of your typing, so it is probably not worth the effort to relearn how to type on a new layout, unless you could use it for all your typing, which you couldn't in the case of an abc friendly layout. I think that answers my question as to whether it is an idea worth pursuing. Perhaps I'll experiment with it myself, and see if I like it any better. Randy. At 02:31 PM 18/11/2003 +, you wrote: Jack Campin writes: | Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as | I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard | mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the | left hand is probably much of this. | | I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - | while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people | do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. | My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in | the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, | and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity | material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed. It has always seemed to me that musicians should react the other way. After all, right-handers who play stringed instruments always seem to want to use their left hand for the fingerboard. And if you're a keyboard player, I'd think you would of necessity be fairly ambidextrous. I usually put a mouse on whichever side is most convenient. I find that switching sides with the mouse doesn't take any thought; I just do it. This seems to surprise a lot of people when they notice it. But I'd think that a keyboard player would just react by asking What sort of keyboards do you play? | What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the | right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it | would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, a clever abc editor might have an option to keep track of the tonic from the K: lines, and map 1-7 to notes in the obvious way. You'd use 0 for a rest. Maybe you could use the + and - keys on the keypad to do octave shifts. Actually, you want lengths, too. So maybe you could use the shift key to select between 1-7 meaning notes and lengths. Then, with the left-hand shift key, you could enter notes and lengths entirely with the right hand. You'd still need to move your hand for bar lines, I suppose. It might be worth experimenting with. -- O :#/ John Chambers + [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
