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Jack Campin writes:
| It might be less confusing if the default behaviour were for these
| accidentals to be reflected in all octaves, with octave-specificity
| being implied by usages like
|
| K:A Mix =G ^g % scale of the "Montgomerie" 18th century smallpipe
| % see Julian Goodacre's website for details
I just fed the following to my version of abc2ps:
X: 1
T: Scale of the "Montgomerie" 18th century smallpipe
N: See Julian Goodacre's website for details
%%staffwidth 10cm
K:AMix=G^g
|: AGA Bcd | efg a3 :|
It worked fine, giving a key signature of ^f^c=G^g. The one minor
quibble is that the last sharp should be moved to the left, so that
it's in the same column as the natural. Getting the spacing exactly
right can be time consuming. Maybe I'll work on it.
| i.e. you have to *say* when something happens differently in different
| octaves.
In all the cases I've seen of music that uses scales like this, the
accidentals have been written in different octaves like this. I
suspect that the musicians realize that readers are likely to
mistakenly apply keysig accidentals to all octaves unless you state
explicitly otherwise.
There's still room for confusion, though. Some people think that the
ABC letters should always apply to the same octave regardless of
clef. So if you were playing the above music on an instrument that
sounds an octave high low, some people would insist that you haven't
specified the accidental for "g'" or "G,". This might produce a
measure of exasperation in your and my mind, but consider that ABC
player software can't be expected to have your intelligence, and it's
mostly people working with player software that want ABC notes to
have fixed pitch. (This is eminently reasonable from their viewpoint
and very bizarre to people who only convert ABC to printed music, so
it's probably an excellent example of an irreconcilable difference in
the interpretation of some ABC extensions.)
| Best of all would be to allow these modes to be defined, on both
| a per-tune and per-file basis:
|
| K:Montgomerie A Mix =G ^g
| ...
| K:E Montgomerie % the original pipe is in fact in E though
| % nobody would notate for it that way
|
| And yes, this *is* a slippery slope sneakily intended to lead to support
| for microtonal modes...
Heh, heh. Wouldn't it be nice? Keep trying, Jack ...
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