John Chambers writes:
>
>wil writes:
>| another way to approach this is to have a special keysig or clef for
drum notation - just
>| as K:HP is supposed to draw notes in highland pipes style (all stems
up, grace
>notes beamed
>| together, default gracenote have 2 flags, if I recall correctly), then
something like
>| K:drum could draw note heads as 'x'...
>
>Well, yeah, and that would make a lot of drummers happy
>with abc. But it probably wouldn't answer the question that
>started this thread. There are a lot of uses for 'x' note
>heads in other than drum music, and usually you want it for
>just a few notes. So what is needed is a way to say "draw
>just these few notes with 'x' heads."
>
>Both approaches would be really useful, of course. And for
>drums, you also want to be able to specify the number of
>lines on the staff, since there's a lot of 1- and 2- line
>drum notation. This isn't without precedent in abc; we've
>already seen a description of an abc program that does
>4-line medieval staff notation.
Obligatory first comment: of course, this can all be done with
abc2mtex. Obligatory second comment: but I've forgotten exactly how.
(Actually, x-heads are easy, but putting strokes thru the note-stems might
be ugly.)
However, a better solution would be to just haul off and do it. I
like Wil's suggestion of making a percussion key or clef part of abc, for
a couple of reasons:
First, while we can probably just hack it, we're running
out of free notation. It's better to save scarce resources and simply
do it right the first time.
Next, abc is eventually going to have to include percussion
notation anyway. We've avoided it for a long time, but the present problem
seems clear and can probably be solved fairly directly, so it's a good
starting place. The main concern is to to be careful not to close off
further extensions to the percussion clef....for there are bound to be
many if percussionists ever start getting interested in abc.
Thirdly, once there is a special percussion clef, the rules can
change: some notation will be freed because it'll be irrelevant to the
percussion clef---e.g. a percussion score which needs up-bow and down-bow
would be very modern indeed. And...less than five lines in a staff? Why
not? So it may not be too difficult to solve this problem. Clearly, it
needs careful discussion---e.g can we use "x" for notes, or will it be
needed for its present purpose?---but, hey, we're good at that, and if we
start with something concrete and think small, it should be possible to
come up with a good solution, namely a compact, human-readable notation
for the side-drums. (And after that, the world...)
Finally---call it spin-off or collateral damage as you
please---solving the note-head problem in this setting may end up solving
it in general. (And you can call me Pollyanna for thinking it will all be
that simple...)
Cheers,
John Walsh
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