> Would you want to use a non-printing rest in a drum part? Yes, perhaps even more than in other music - about the commonest pattern you get is alternating rests in one hand against notes in the other, and often the rests are left implicit.
> I've wondered if a better solution might be > to have a general "don't print the next symbol" modifier. Some abc > programs already use [|] for a non-printing bar line. If we were to, > say, adopt 'i' (for "invisible") as a modifier, then x becomes iz and > [|] becomes i|, and we can then use x for other purposes. I can think > of a few other situations where we might like to have something in > the abc that would be played but not displayed. Good idea. This could be very handy for marking editorial stuff, but it would need to have a rather unusual binding strength: I've often wanted to use editorial accidentals, and if you had this sign binding to the immediately following note *or accidental* it could represent them. Thus "i_B" would print as B and play as B flat. If you wanted a B flat that played but didn't print you'd use "_iB" (I'm assuming nobody wants isolated accidentals printed unattached to any visible note). You would want the converse too: "j_B" would print as B flat but play as B and "_jB" would print as B flat but not play at all. Having an "x" notehead isn't that important for percussion, and can simply make it difficult to notate duration. Where you really do need it is when you're doing something percussive with a non-percussion instrument, e.g. the raps on the fiddle body in "The Four Poster Bed" - in a percussion score it's obvious from the context and consistent throughout the piece whether a specific pitch is intended. For the sporadic-percussive-noise case, a separate "note" in ABC would have a clear semantics for player software - "something of no very definite pitch that sounds quite unlike whatever the instrument does with other notes". How that got pinned down further can stay implementation- dependent, it doesn't make a great deal of difference to most uses whether it comes out as a squeal, a thunderclap or a fart. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
