Heh, heh. Just keep reminding yourself that we're dealing with musicians here. And "traditional" musicians at that. This is a gang that is, to a great degree, contemptuous of all music notation, and tends to agree that the best musician is one who is illiterate. There isn't the slightest chance that such a population will ever agree on notation.
It's worse with abc than usual, because the main reason for abc's success is its simplicity. So you'd expect users to prefer whatever is the "simplest" solution to any specific problem. This is the main motive behind "my pet notation". But the simplest solution depends on the style you're playing. It's easy to give examples of simple and elegant notation for one style that is just wrong for another. So don't expect any sort of easy agreement on such things. Laurie commented: | Brilliantly put. My frustrations in a nutshell! | | > Is there some standard way to notate complex chords like m7(b5) | > 7(b13)...? | | Mike Whitaker remarked: | No. No two people seem to be able to agree on a standard for naming | chords. (I speak from experience of trying to *propose* a naming | convention for chords that would allow ABC-to-MIDI programs to parse them.) | | The basic problems include: | | - people who think + means 'add' and - means 'remove' | - people who think + means 'sharpen' and - means 'flatten' | - people who think + means 'augmented' | - what does Cb9 mean? (Cb)9, or C(b9)? | - people who can't distinguish between a single standard that allows | chords to be machine-readable, and 'you've left my pet notation out' To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
