John Chambers wrote: >Jeff wrote: >| > From: John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >| > In any case, most musicians don't consider them to be different. >| >| This one does. :-) Some folk musicians may not consider them to be >| different, but I'd argue that most classical musicians do. > >Yeah; fiddlers generally distinguish them. Players of plucked strings >and keyboard generally don't. I play all three, so I'm completely at >odds with myself on the issue ...
I'm a guitar player, and I certainly distinguish them. <> >Well, golly; I was expecting to trigger a flame war. And here >everyone seems to be very nearly agreeing ... > >My recommendation for a standard recommendation would be to say that >in ABC, these are all legal: > A- A > (A A) > A- B > (A B) I don't have a lot of use for A- B (although I suppose you could use it to imply that you get from A to B by bending the note sharp, rather than plucking or hammering on, which is what I would take (A B) to mean). I don't think most people would understand that though, so if I used it for that purpose I'd have to say so in words in the header. >We should also attempt an education campaign to teach musicians what >the difference is between a tie and a slur. This will be a losing >battle, and a lot of ABC will always confuse the two, just as a lot >of printed music confuses them. But attempting to restrict usage to >some obscure rules isn't very useful; education is much better. Despite all suggestions to the contrary, I haven't yet come across an abc tune where A- B appeared to be a genuine attempt to convey a stylistic nuance rather than a mistake. You see it most often in tunes which are full of other mistakes. >This doesn't make life easy for those trying to write ABC players. You can say that again. >One idea might be to officially encourage the use of the A: header >field to label specific styles. This could help if you want to make >sense of such style-specific notation. And, since people won't do >this, and because we want to play things in different styles, the >software should have options to override any such things and impose a >style. This is really how things like > and < should be handled. Yes and no. > and < should be handled first exactly as the standard says, but with the option of applying a stress program which shortens or lengthens the notes in each bar in a regular pattern invoked by the R: field. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
