Henrik Norbeck writes:
| Ewan E. Macpherson wrote:
| > To allow for this, here is my suggestion: abcMus would use a (user
| > editable) file containing a list of gracenote timing templates.
|
| But this only solves the problem for GHB music. It does not solve
| the general problem of for instance:
| AB | c4{dc} BA |
| And similar cases where you would want the grace notes to steal
| time from the note before them, not the one after them.
| In standard music notation this is done by drawing a little slur
| connecting the grace notes and the note they're supposed to steal
| time from. So how do we write this in ABC? Any suggestions?
| I know we have discussed it before at some time in the past, but I
| think we never reached any conclusion.
I think it's because abc mirrors conventional staff
notation, which has the same problem. The only real answer
to "How do you play this grace note?" is "It depends on the
musical style."
This is not a very useful answer if you're trying to write
a player program.
The suggestion of marking the grace not that comes on the
beat (with a '.') would work if the only problem you're
trying to solve is when to play that one note. It doesn't
give you the relative timing of the other notes. That would
require somewhat more complicated notation.
And in any case, when you translate abc grace notes to a
staff with tadpoles, you will lose the timing information.
I have occasionally thought of the Baroque notation, where
grace notes are drawn with small heads but with their true
lengths, and take that much away from the big-headed note
(which usually follows, but can precede the grace notes).
We'd have to make lengths valid on abc grace notes to use
this approach.
If we did this, then one could write
{dc2B}c8
and it would mean the same as
dc2Bc4
The obvious question is "Why not just write the latter?"
This is the usual question from people who first stumble
across the funny Baroque notation. The answer, of course,
is that you can always write out ornaments in full. The
benefit to marking them as ornaments is that the musician
then knows immediately that they are ornaments to a main
note. Musicians familiar with the style find this useful
information. Novices usually don't, because they haven't
yet learned the ornamentation in that style.
Anyway, it's not obvious how one could make abc's grace
notes more precise in a manner that would work with more
than one or two styles.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
