Richard Robinson writes: | On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 01:15:54PM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: | | > And from the abc source you have written | > | > K:A_b^f^c | > | > shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A? | | It definitely shouldn't have a G#, since the Gs aren't sharp. | | It's K:A<something> since A seems, to me, the root note. Amix would have | been better - I have a vague memory that I tried that and it didn't work | at the time, so the result's a kludge. But it does now. | | It would seem more logical to write just K:Amix _B to get Bb and the | usual 2 sharps, but in abc2mps that produces a sig with 1 flat, only, | so the full spelling out seems necessary. OTOH, the shorter version | works with jcabc2ps, but that doesn't accept spaces in it. I rather | prefer the appearance from abcm2ps - and, spelling all the accidentals | out seems to let me control which order they're shown in, which is nice ... | If I use K:Amix_B^f^c in jcabc2ps it prints the sharps twice.
(Hmmm ... I tried to make it accept spaces. Maybe I'd better do a bit more debugging.) Anyway, after playing around with such key signatures a bit, it quickly became obvious that, if an explicit list of accidentals is included, then the mode should *not* default to "major". This would produce some very baffled users. The right default is no mode, i.e., no accidentals other than what is listed. To see why, consider a simple case like E hejaz/freygish, which is E F ^G A B c d e Any musician who knows what this sort of scale is will write this: K:E^G If the default is major, then the musician will get a result that is indistinguishable from E major. The ^G may be shown twice (in both octaves), which will be even more confusing. The only solution would be to write this: K:Ephr^G Now this may seem reasonable, because in fact it's exactly right. But it has one serious problem: You need to use a different mode for each tonic note. This will make sense to someone intricately familiar with the classical European modes. But to the other 99% of the musicians in the world, it will be utterly baffling. If I want to do the same thing with a tonic of A, I'll have to write something like: K:Amin_B^c These are the same sort of scale. That is, they really are the same "mode". But I'd have to write a different mode name for each, and the name has no obvious relation to the actual mode. The reason is that the mode would be used solely to cancel the major key signature. This would be hopeless, and would defeat the whole purpose of having an explicit key signature. So the right way to do it is to accept either a mode or a list of accidentals, or both. Only if both are missing do you assume major. OTOH, I do like to use both. If you use "K:Ephr^G", you can tranpose it down a step by just writing "K:Dphr^F", and transposing it to A is then "K:Aphr^c". You just do the same shift to the tonic and to all the accidentals. If you use "K:E^G", then transposing to A would give you "K:A_B^c", which isn't quite as trivial. I've gotta make sure that spaces are accepted everywhere here ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
