| I know I said I was going to shut up about this for the time being, but while
| looking for Morrison's Reel on John Chambers' tune finder I came across a lot
| of versions of Morrison's Jig. Here are four of them. Observe the
| K:commands.
|
| ...
| K:D
| K:EDor
| K:G
| K:Bm
| ...
| Why is life so complicated? Wouldn't K:^f^c be a lot simpler?
Yah. This is one of the minor reasons I hacked abc2ps to allow it,
though it wasn't the primary reason.
The K: line giving tonic and mode was a Good Idea, and in principle
it's useful for lookups. But in practice, there are a surprising
number of musicians, some of them very good at playing music, who are
utterly clueless about keys and modes and such. And, when you try to
educate them a bit, you quickly discover that they have no intention
of learning, and are openly contemptuous of intellectuals who think
such things are important. So there's no hope of ever reaching a
Perfect World in which all the tunes have the correct K: line. Note
the K:G, implying that at least one person couldn't even be bothered
to distinguish major from minor and typed '^' before each 'c' without
wondering whether there was something suspicious about this.
Which doesn't mean that K:EDor is a bad idea. It just means that a
lookup using this useful information is forever doomed to miss a few
that are mislabelled. But this is not materially different from the
fact that a match on "Morrison's" misses those labelled "Morison's"
or "Morisson's" or "Morrisson's". And the fact that people can't be
bothered to add "Reel" (or even include a R: line) makes it difficult
to filter out the versions of Morrison's Jig, and vice versa. One of
the facts of life on the Web is a lot of low-quality text.
Unfortunately, nothing involving music notation will ever be simple.
The needs and expectations of different musicians are just too, well,
different, for simplicity to be possible. And a lot of musicians
aren't about to waste time making their notation easy for you. Even a
brief glance at a lot of the ABC on the net makes it abundantly clear
that many people don't give a damn about making it readable.
(It's fairlyeasy to write a nenglish parody,to illustrate thesortof a!
bc that alotof people produce.
Much of it,of course, is machine-genera!
ted by programs,that,present, a,graphical-interface,so the users don'!
tsee the abc themselves.It looks fine on their screen,so it must be f!
ine,right?)
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