>> I think abc's biggest shortcomming is the fundamental of only being
>> able to put a chord where there is a melody-note. I consider this a
>> major bummer, and guess everybody (except me) writes stuff like
>> | "A Am"C4 |
> Not me, I write
> | "C" A- "Cdim" A- "Dm7" A- "G9" A- | "C6" A2 z2 |
> Which is, by the way, also ugly...
I suggested a fix for this a few years ago, which nobody took up. My
idea was to have an extra kind of dummy note, which would only have
time value (like a rest) but would have the effect of adding to the
length of the last preceding real note. Say we used "y" for this - at
the time, nobody had pinched it for anything else. Then Ulf's example
could be written
| "C" A "Cdim" y "Dm7" y "G9" y- | "C6" A2 z2 |
The display you'd get would look the same as the rendering of a merged-
stave two-voice display the way Atte does it:
[V:1] | "C" x "Cdim" x "Dm7" x "G9" x | "C6" x2 x2 |
[V:2] | A4- | A2 z2 |
that is, the first bar would display (and play) with four evenly-spaced
chords, while the melody would be displayed and played as a single A4
note tied across to the next bar.
Now some people have grabbed "y", maybe we could do the same thing
by introducing a different kind of tie; this would have the effect
of absorbing the note tied on the right into the one on the left,
extending its duration. The obvious symbol is "--", as there's no
other reason to write two ties together. So Ulf's example becomes
| "C" A-- "Cdim" A-- "Dm7" A-- "G9" A- | "C6" A2 z2 |
The last tie is a normal one because we want the A2 in the next bar
displayed separately (in Renaissance music with "hint" barlines, we
wouldn't).
Neither of these should be hard to implement, surely?
I prefer the "--" way as it eats less of the alphabet and seems more
readable; you don't need to know previous context to tell what pitch
is playing.
In fact you can already do exactly what Ulf wants in BarFly, using its
"y" symbol for horizontal space (nb, the tie is in a different place
in the ABC):
| "C" A4- "Cdim" y "Dm7" y "G9" y | "C6" A2 z2 |
The problem with that is that the effect of BarFly's "y" depends
on the note-spacing rule used by the program, so it isn't portable
to other platforms (and probably won't even be portable to future
versions of BarFly). The spacing of the chords you'd end up with
on a different implementation would be anybody's guess in a multi-
voice piece.
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
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