John Chambers wrote:
>Phil Taylor wrote:
>| John Atchley wrote:
>| >Finally, just to throw an even bigger wrench in the works, I'm pretty
>sure I've
>| >seen a bit of abc that names the voices, instead of numbering them. I.e.
>| >something like V: alto to switch to the voice named alto. Apparently,
>there must
>| >be some package out there that uses this convention.
>|
>| Yes I've seen that. I thought that came from an early version of
>| abc2ps. You could do it with macros in BarFly if you really wanted
>| to - just define V: alto to be equivalent to V:2 or whatever.
>
>I suspect that you might have misinterpreted this. The current abc2ps
>accepts V:alto, but it isn't a voice change. It means that the
>current voice is to switch to alto clef. K:alto would do the same
>thing, as would V:clef=alto.
Ah! I see.
>Specifying the clef with either V: or K: seems to be very reasonable.
>K: would be preferred by people typing a single voice (and not using
>V: at all). But in multi-voice music, it's handy to be able to switch
>clefs in one voice without affecting any others.
Would you then expect a K: field in multivoice to affect all voices
simultaneously? It's not the case in BarFly, since you can have
simultaneous voices playing in different keys. (I haven't actually
found any use for this, but it might come in handy if I ever get
avant garde.) It is not uncommon for music to need different M: and
L: fields in different voices, so for the sake of consistency I treat
K: the same. This does, however, confuse users who complain that
when they write something like:
K:C
V:1 ABc def |
V:2 A,B,C DEF |
K: C#
V:1 ABc def |
V:2 A,B,C DEF |
only voice 2 changes key. (Because the K: field is at the end of the
first line of V2.) To get the desired effect you would have to write:
K:C
V:1 ABc def |
V:2 A,B,C DEF |
V:1
K: C#
ABc def |
V:2
K: C#
A,B,C DEF |
>One complication that we might want to keep is that the tokens "bass"
>and "alto" and "treble" imply "clef=". There are a number of ABC
>tools that accept this now, and rather than break existing ABC, it
>would be nice if we could just make these into alternatives. There
>has also been a reasonable suggestion that we accept clef=G, clef=C
>and clef=F with their expected meanings.
Perfectly reasonable.
>The Early Music gang would really like it if we could also place
>clefs at other than the default position on the staff. One simple
>syntax was to use middle=<note> to give the letter-to-line mapping.
>This would make "clef=G middle=B" equivalent to "clef=treble" (or
>just "treble"), while "clef=G middle=d" would be the French violin
>clef. All three clefs are regularly placed at different positions by
>at least a few kinds of musicians.
Careful - we might get sidetracked into discussing transposition:-)
Phil Taylor
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