| On Tue, 21 May 2002, Atte Andre Jensen wrote: | | These two are from the april issue of modern drummer, the leading drumming | magazine: | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/1.gif | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/2.gif | | These are from "Beyond Bop Drumming" by John Riley: | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/3.gif | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/4.gif | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/5.gif | | And the last three are from "Advanced concepts" by Kim Plainfield: | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/6.gif | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/7.gif | http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/8.gif | | All are using regular five-note systems with percussion clef (the official | term for the rectangular box replacing the clef). All examples rely on a | "key" to define what notes are where, all though standards more or less | include snare on c, hihats and cymbals high and low the stuff being played | by the feet (bassdrumm and foot hihat). | | What's needed to implement this in abc is just the special noteheads + the | precussion clef.
Hmmm ... Y'know; that might not be too difficult. For the "x" note heads, it would have been nice if 'x' hadn't been already taken up as an invisible rest; it would have made an intuitively-correct modifier for this purpose. Maybe we could use '*' for this purpose, so the *e would be an e with an 'x' for the note head. Either clef=drum or clef=perc might be good ways to show the clef. I wonder how long it would take to hack this into your typical abc2ps formatter? | I asked the guy who supplied me with this about the single line system, | and he said that he couldn't think of "any serious application" for that. | He agreed that sometimes you just wanna write really simplified percussion | stuff, but that that would normally be notated as the above examples. I've seen a fair number of one- and two-line drum staffs in Balkan and Middle-Eastern music. It makes sense there, where the typical traditional band has percussion, but typically not very many kinds of gadgets. One-line rhythmic notation is conventional in Balkan music for showing the meter. A time signature like 25/16 is silly, because there are many 25-count rhythms, and 25/16 doesn't distinguish them. Even in a simple case like 9/8, your typical Balkan musician will ask "Which one?" and is not being facetious. Instead, you'll see a line at the upper left that looks like: a3 a2a2 a3 a2a2 a2a2 a3 a2a2 except that rather than leger lines there's a single horizontal line. (Trivia question: What's the best-known tune in that rhyuthm? ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
