On Monday, September 26, 2011, Niek van den Berg wrote:

> I take this as a challenge :-) I have some ideas on how a percussion
> notation could be implemented although I still don't know enough of the
> Rosegarden internals to see any pitfall in front.

Implementing a new clef glyph to get on paper is easy, but making it work is 
going to be really involved.  The existing clefs just act as a conversion 
factor for height on staff.  If it would have been at height n in treble (all 
internals work in treble) then it's going to be at height n + conversionFactor 
in bass or tenor or whatever.

That's all simple enough when there's a simple 1:1 conversion factor between 
one and the other, but what a percussion clef is going to have to do is 
something entirely more complicated.  It's going to have some kind of map that 
puts a snare drum at height h, and maps whatever MIDI pitch produces a snare 
drum to that height.

I _think_ we can achieve all of that through the existing Clef, because the 
Clef class is what returns the height on staff to the notation editor.  That 
one case would just have to be vastly more complex than any of the others.  I 
think the layout code would look left to the nearest clef, and this would come 
out right.

The hardest part of all of this is deciding where to compromise to reach the 
largest number of potential users.  It seems like it would be almost 
impossible to do an infinitely flexible mechanism that could take into account 
every different standard for percussion notation, and every different MIDI 
drum mapping.  We might want to settle on the most common standard used by the 
biggest majority of published drum sheet music, and limit the mapping to 
General MIDI.  Or not.  I can't make that call at all, because I know bupkis 
about percussion notation.

It's just a fat lot of stuff for me to try to get my head around.  The last 
time I brought this topic up, someone referred me to a 15,000-page treatise on 
percussion notation, and I decided to run away.

If we ever do have a working two bar percussion clef though, we have thousands 
of instrument presets in the "create segments with" database that are 
currently disabled.  That's another thing to look at, come to think of it.  
Look through all that, and figure out whether we even want to try to keep 
those, since most of them can't be represented with General MIDI anyway (eg. 
automotive brake drum).
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre

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