I. Oppenheim writes: | On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | | > << Thus [Ace]4 could be | > > used for [A4c4e4]. >> | | > Heavy ABC User* cries plaintively: | > Could we at least get this one in and worry about the "chords containing | > different note lengths" (can't recall when I've run across this) at some | > other time? | | I've added the following to the upcomming revision of | the draft standard. Please let me know if it is | acceptable. | | << | All the notes within a chord should have the same | length. More complicated chords can be transcribed with | the & operator, see section Voice overlay. | | The chord forms a syntactic grouping, to which the same | prefixes and postfixes can be attached as to an | ordinary note, except for accidentals. In particular, | the following notation is legal: | | ( "^I".[CEG]- > [CEG] "^IV" [F=AC]3/2"^V"[GBD]/ H[CEG]2 ) | | When both inside and outside the chord length modifiers | are used, they should be multiplied. I.e. [C2E2G2]3 has | the same meaning as [CEG]6. | >>
Very good. It might be better to not totally outlaw notes of different lengths, but rather to say that it isn't a good idea because most cases can't be represented in standard staff notation. There are a few valid uses for such things. Something you see in a lot of guitar music is a chord with one or two white note heads, very often with a dangling tie that leads to no matching note. This has a well-defined meaning to a guitar player. I wonder if there's a way to get this "let it ring" notation in abc? When I first learned abc, there weren't many examples of the [...] chord notation, and the docs were sketchy. I determined by experimenting that abc2ps only used the length of the first note, so I figured that was how abc did it, and I wrote all such chords with just the first length, as in [G2B][A2c] [B3d][Ac]. Then, some time later, I ran across the comment that different-length notes were in fact meaningful, and you really should put a length on every note. So I started doing that, although it didn't make any difference in the output that I saw. I've since gone back a fixed some of my older tunes that use chords, but I can guarantee that I haven't found them all. And I've noticed abc from other people that does the same thing. So we do have at least a small amount of abc around that does things this way. Maybe I'll try to find the rest and fix them, too. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
