On 15 Aug 2005 at 8:40, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > David W. Fenton schrieb: > > That kind of font works great if you're *not* click assigning, just > > typing in as though you were putting in actual lyrics for vocal > > music, but I hate type-in-score as a general rule, and find it too > > much trouble remembering the keyboard layout (for any font). And I'm > > not about to go through and type in all the figures through a piece > > as lyrics -- there's too much chance for things to go wrong and for > > things to get out of order. > > I must admit that I never even thought of using your method, though I > will try it. However, if you ever entered figures for a French piece, > where there are mostly 3 figures under every note, sometimes as many > as 7 (admittedly the exception) I sort of doubt that your method would > be very efficient.
Well, the last 8 projects I've done with figured bass have all been French, by Charpentier, Bernier and Clerambault. I've not finished the figured bass in very many of these (because I'm entering most of these just to create a bass part for me to play on the gamba), but here are some of them (not finished scores, because I wasn't engraving for score purposes so there are lots of unaddressed spacing issues), but I've not encountered more than 3 figures in this repertory: Only 2 cases of 3 figures: http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Charpentier-Seasons.pdf Never more than 2: http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Charpentier- GaudeDeFelixAnna.pdf Only a few cases of 3 figures (11 or 12), though the figures are put in for only the first 153 measures of 257): http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Clérambault_Clitie.PDF No cases of 3 figures, though this one is hardly begun in terms of figuring (only 27mm. of 234); there are actually very few cases of 3 figures in the rest of the piece (about the same as the Clerambault): http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Bernier_Protée.pdf Other pieces with no figures yet in them that do have 3 figures, but never 4 (or so seldom I can't see them scanning through the original printed editions): http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Bernier_Nymphes.pdf http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Bernier_Zephirs.pdf http://www.dfenton.com/Collegium/Scores/Clérambault_Zephire.pdf Now, I certainly know that the figures in German music from this same period can become quite complex. But I don't see that the issue is much different either way. The easiest way for me to handle it is to split the figures between top and bottom of the bass staff, exactly as I see it done in contemporary sources. That would only be possible in your system with multiple verses. Last of all, 4 figures really seems problematic for me for placing above the bass line. Contemporary sources are almost universal, in my experience, in putting the figures *above* the bass line -- it is the most logical place for them, since that's where one will be realizing them. Some modern editions put the figures all below the bass line, and this makes it difficult to realize them on the fly. Of course, most such editions do so because they print a realization and are trying to keep them out of the way of the realization (a problem that is evident in a few places in my Charpentier Seasons edition, where I've realized the bass in the first section). So, I'm not sure that your font solution would work substantially better with lots of layers of figures, in comparison to my method with a verse for each layer. I can see that in most cases you'd have two figures throughout, and putting those in with one pass through each measure could be less error-prone. But for the kinds of materials I've been putting in, I've never encountered that density of figures, nor had any particularly difficulties using individual verses for each layer. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
