>> No can do. Skinner's books use a lot of fiddle-specific notation that >> ABC can't represent. > I'm not convinced. Could you give us some examples?
Opening "The Scottish Violinist" at random, I hit page 48. All the tunes on the page have fermatas, which are doable in most current implementations of ABC but I think not in the same way. "The Rolling Spey" has: - dal segno (not specified in ABC so any player program can use it), with the segno placed between a gracenote group and the following note (that's going to be a fun one to implement) - last-time-round ending (also not an ABC control structure) - finger numbers - crescendos and diminuendos across several notes, in one case with a sforzando hairpin within the scope of the diminuendo - indications "4 bows", "16" and "12 bows" for three bars - straight slurs between staccato notes - ties between notes marked as staccato - double stops on the same note with one of them having a slurred gracenote, (^d[e2)e2] - you *can* write that in ABC but I doubt if any two programs will interpret it the same way "Professor Blackie" adds: - alternate individual notes for first and second time (at least I presume they aren't meant as double stops) - acciaccaturas - looped ties (is that what you call them? - between the last two notes) "The Editor's Farewell" adds: - harmonics (that's what the circles on the e' and some other notes mean, I think?) - a kind of accent marked by a staccato dot with a dash under it (at the end of bar 4) All three tunes have both a "genre" marking and "how to play it" marking in different typefaces. On the facing page, "Hector the Hero" has a sample verse of the text under the title, "Sarona" adds "rit. ... a tempo", and "Delnabo" has turn-with-a-sharp (something long overdue in ABC), nested slurs (which not all ABC software will get right or use the same syntax for) and apparently wants something stopped with the 6th finger, which suggests Skinner was wanting violinists to evolve as well as their notation. Perhaps no one fiddler will use all of that detail but representability in ABC shouldn't be the criterion for what to leave out. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
