It feels silly posting this amidst all the talk of standards, etc., but I'm going to
post anyway.
I asked a while ago about drum notation (I'm not a drummer, but I'm trying to
transcribe the drum music for my Corps). I have since gotten ALMOST everything I need
to do by using the existing functionality of abcm2ps.
The one thing I'm missing is putting the slashes on the stems of the notes.
Obviously, an extension to the code is necessary, and I'm even willing to <gasp> step
outside the bounds of the emerging abc standard to accomplish my goal, since my real
intention is only in creating pretty postscript output, suitable for a tunebook of
printed notation.
My problem is (and I'm sure many of you will agree that it is only "my problem") that
my C skills are pretty minimal (since, obviously, changes to draw.c need to happen),
and I don't even know where to start in writing the postscript code to make this
happen.
A notation I propose for my usage (might others find it useful as well?) is to put
slashes "//" _before_ the note on which I want the slashes to occur, since, in my
first estimation, they should be unambiguous symbols (please correct if I am wrong).
Also note that I am abusing the guitar chord functionality to put the number of
strokes above the staff where they belong, so my current code looks like this, for the
first section of a simple beat:
(Note that there is only 1 line of abc, regardless of whatever line breaking my mail
program creates)
T:Plain 2/4
M:2/4
L:1/8
K:perc
%%graceslurs no
V:1 up
c|:"7"c{c}c {c}cc-|"7"c{c}c {c}cc-|"7"c{c}c {c}c/Lc/c/c/|[1.2.3. {c}c{c}c {c}cc-:|[2
{c}c{c}c {c}c{c}c||
The result ps looks surprisingly good, with the exception of the slashes on the stems
that I want to indicate a roll. The note should look like this (pardon the ASCII art):
|
|
|/
/|/
/|
|
|
000|
00000
00000
000
So, to make my pickup note in my example a roll using the slashes, how about a
notation like this:
//c and if I want 3 or 4 slashes, just put them there, like this: ////c
Also, the "7" I put in as a guitar chord is supposed to be the number of strokes for
the roll, so we could possibly even incorporate that number into the slash notation,
perhaps like this:
//7c
Am I way out there, or is anything like this even conceivable?
I suppose another way of doing the slashes is to use text annotations, perhaps?
If we could, say, make the literal slashes appear instead of to the left, or right of
the note, we could align them with the note, and raise them a certain number of units.
Any thoughts?
Thanks for reading if you got this far. :-)
-Chris
Christopher Myers
em: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
aim: chrismyers001
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