Martin Tarenskeen writes: | On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, I. Oppenheim wrote: | | > [K:bass middle=D] will achieve exactly what you want. | | You mean [K:bass middle=d] ? | | D, is 2 octaves below d, which is what abcm2ps does and what I need.
Heh, heh; that old issue rears its ugly head again. ;-) I think the only reasonable thing is to state that different abc programs have (and probably always will have) different defaults for the note-staff mapping, and if you don't use the middle= term, you can expect that the results will be unreliable. I've always been partial to middle=d for bass, too, because that eliminates all the awkward typing of commas for notes on a bass staff. Most people who type abc directly will want it this way. And people who play bass instruments will be a bit baffled by the suggestion that they are playing transposing instruments. Few cello players think that their instrument is a violin that transposes down two octaves. Men who are basses don't usually think of themselves as transposed altos. But other people want abc notes to have an absolute pitch, and think that bass lines should be written with treble note values. For some purposes (such as writing a MIDI generator) this is very convenient. Past discussions have shown that they aren't going to be convinced by any silly argument about ease of typing or reading the abc. (And as a keyboard player, I also like the mapping that puts C-B on the top of the bass staff, and c-b on the bottom of the treble staff. But nobody other than keyboard players seem to see the sense in this. ;-) The most useful approach is to state flatly that there is no default note-staff mapping for anything other than treble clef. If you don't use the middle= term, you'll get whatever the software gives you. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
