John Walsh wrote; >John Chambers writes: > >>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? >> > > Or even, taking a leaf from K:HP, K:perc or K:perc(ADor). Or >whatever. A drum clef is bound to be a bit special, to say the least. >It could have its own special rules---no need to adopt _all_ the old >rules, and carry over _all_ of the old notation, unless they're needed. >Most things will carry over, but if something useful and intuitive in drum >notation conflicts with something fairly obscure in the rest of abc, it >shouldn't be too hard to decide between them. (E.g., the drum clef could >even use "x" for the note-heads and "*" for invisible rests...if they're >needed. It won't break any existing tunes, since no-one has used the drum >clef yet.)
That's probably the best approach IMHO. It's similar to the way I do Gregorian chant - if you add one of the eight Gregorian clefs to the K: field you get a completely different notation with its own rules, a four-line staff, square note heads and slur brackets used to group the notes into neumes. If you are going to use a five-line staff though you will need to retain pitches to specify which line the note appears on, and if you want to play it via midi you have to specify a pitch to get the correct instrument. > That said, how deeply is the invisible rest embedded in abc? I had >the impression it was introduced to get around the limitations of the >guitar chord mechanism. If ever one could rationalize that... No, it's more important than that. In multivoice abc, when you merge two voices onto one staff you often need to suppress rests in one of the voices, but they still have to play and they're still needed to align the voices correctly. You would probably have even more need for this in a percussion score. Phil Taylor (Trying again:-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
