--------
Phil Taylor writes:
|
| You do have to be careful with proposals to mess with the K: field,
| because it serves two purposes; it not only supplies key/mode info
| but serves to delimit the tune header. Introducing a k: field before
| the existing K: will work:
|
| X:1
| T:test
| M:6/8
| k:^c^f
| K:D
| abc abc||
|
| BarFly (and probably most other programs) ignores unknown fields in
| the header, so this causes no problems. If you do it the other way
| round:
|
| X:2
| T:test
| M:6/8
| K:D
| k:^c^f
| abc abc||
|
| it will cause an error, and of course if you leave out the K: field
| it will break all existing programs.
|
| I can't see that this serves any purpose which is not already served
| by the long-established K:D %^c^f or just K:D % two sharps.
Thought I'd mention that my K-extended abc2ps will accept K:D^c^f and
do what you'd (or I'd) expect with it. Note that, while K:D^f^c is
pointless, K:D^c^f actually does something different from K:D. It
puts the two sharps in a different order from the standard. I don't
know why anyone would want to do this, but I suppose you could, and
I'd guess that most people wouldn't even notice. The keysig K:D^f^c
is not wrong; it's simply redundant. But then, it's redundant in the
same way that K:Dmajor is redundant. We probably wouldn't want to
hang someone for such usage.
In the case of non-classical keysigs, the order of accidentals isn't
very well standardized, and is an opportunity for some aesthetic
judgement. My abc2ps will let you indicate the klezmer "freygish"
scale as, for example, K:Dphr^f, but this has a problem. It appends
the ^f to the Dphr keysig, giving _B_e^f, and the _e and ^f bump into
each other in an unaesthetic fashion. If you look at published music
that uses such keysigs, you see two solutions:
K:^f_B_e
K:_B_e^F
Both of these are visually more appealing than K:_B_e^f. And it's a
good idea in either case to specify the tonic:
K:D^f_B_e
K:D_B_e^F
The reason is that there's another scale with the same accidentals:
K:C^f_B_e
K:C_B_e^F
Wouldn't want to confuse these, would we? That would make the ABC as
ambiguous as traditional staff notation, which has the same key
signature for both of these scales.
BTW, you can see examples of both of these scales at:
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/Klezmer/VonDerChuppe.abc
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/Klezmer/Yoshke48.abc
My doctored abc2ps produces nice copies of these with the correct key
signatures for each scale (and also a step higher for those who play
Bb instruments).
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