Laurie writes:
| ... (Are trills more important than hammer-ons?
| Depends - which do you play more often? Flute or guitar).
Hmmm ... To non-string players, "hammer-on" seems like a synonym for
"apoggiatura". I'd say it's a lot more common than a trill in every
kind of music that I play.
| I think the distinction between graces that steal time from the
| previous note and those which steal from the following is
| musically important.
This is something that staff notation has traditionally not made
clear. The culprit is usually the publisher, who typically has rules
saying how such things are drawn, so that all cases are mapped to the
same marks on the paper. Some people have indicated the distinction
by drawing the grace note next to the big note that it steals time
from, with or without a slur to that note. But if your printer
refuses to do that, or quietly rewrites it, there's not much you can
do. So musicians have learned that grace-note notation is meaningless
and they have to work it out from what they know of the style.
| I'm not 100% clear on the syntax you
| are proposing for this. If I want to do
| | G4 {A} B4 |
| how do you write the two cases which would sound like
| | G2-G-G/2-G/4-G/8 A/8 B4 |
| or
| | G4 A/8 B/8-B/4-B/2-B-B2 |
| ?
Well, what would probably be intuitively clear to a lot of readers
would be to write things like:
| G4 {A}B4 |
| G4{A} B4 |
| G4 ({A}B4) |
| (G4{A}) B4 |
| (G4 {A})B4 |
| G4({A} B4) |
These would have the obvious translation to staff notation. A player
would simply make ornaments steal time from their adjacent note. I'd
think that most musicians would understand any of these without
explanation. There's no new ABC syntax here, only a clarification of
what it means to group notes together.
Of course, there's still a need to understand the style, to determine
such things as how long the grace note should be, how it should
really be articulated, and so on. But ABC's use of spaces to group
notes is fairly clear and obvious (though limited to a depth of one).
We might suggest that people start using such notation right now, to
notate their favorite airs for example. Then we can challenge the
programmers to do the Right Thing with them. If we succeed at this,
then we'll have one more thing we can point to as an example of why
ABC is better than printed music.
(Not that printed music can't do the same thing; the problem is that
the stupid publishers f*** it up. ;-)
This doesn't say what to do about something like |G{A}B|, where the
intent is to have G anb B beamed together with a grace note between
them. I suspect that this can't be handled without a significant
addition to ABC's syntax. This is similar to the problem of doing
subgrouping of notes within a double beam, which standard music
notation can do easily but can't be represented in ABC. The simplest
way I can think of to handle these problems would be to extend the w:
use of the tilde as a "non-separating space", and also use it within
groups of notes to indicate an internal subgrouping. It would mean
you could write CDE~FGA with L:1/16, and get a double beam connecting
CDE and FGA, but just a single beam connecting EF. G{A}~B would then
imply that the {A} is attached to (i.e., drawn closer to and stealing
time from) the G and not the B. But this would definitely be new ABC
syntax.
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