Atte writes: | On Thu, 23 May 2002, John Walsh wrote: | <snip> | > E.g., the drum clef could | > even use "x" for the note-heads and "*" for invisible rests...if they're | > needed. It won't break any existing tunes, since no-one has used the drum | > clef yet. | | Possible, but IMHO ugly...
You're right; 'x' would be the best symbol. With the 5-line staff, you'd still want to use A-Ga-g for the notes, to get the positioning. But you'd need a way of saying to draw the note head as an 'x' rather than an oval, and 'x' is the obvious way to do this. John Walsh's suggestion that K:perc (or maybe K:clef=perc) trigger a mapping of 'x' to this use is probably a good one. There isn't much use of 'x' as a non-printing rest (yet). Would you want to use a non-printing rest in a drum part? If so, we might want to discuss what do do with this use of 'x'. It might not be too late to change it. I've wondered if a better solution might be to have a general "don't print the next symbol" modifier. Some abc programs already use [|] for a non-printing bar line. If we were to, say, adopt 'i' (for "invisible") as a modifier, then x becomes iz and [|] becomes i|, and we can then use x for other purposes. I can think of a few other situations where we might like to have something in the abc that would be played but not displayed. Also, I wonder about trying to do a 5-line perc staff as a single abc voice Does this actually work reasonably well? I'd think you'd have a lot of the same sort of problems as with keyboard music in abc. The basic problem is that a drum kit and a keyboard both tend to have a lot of little "voices" that appear and disappear, and abc has no simple way to show this. A simple example for keyboards is a held note or chord, as [B4D4], and while this is held, you have G2F in a subsidiary voice starting on count 2. This is easy to draw on a staff, and easy for one hand to play on a keyboard. But how do you write it in abc? The simplest seems to be something like: [V:1] ... [B4D4] ... [V:2] ... xG2F ... With a drum kit, I'd think you would run into a lot of problems like this, since each line really is a different "voice", and they can easily do things that overlap. But I suppose a bit of thought could usually reduce the drum part to only two or three "voices", so it wouldn't be that bad. This is what you have to do with keyboard music. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
