Laurie writes: | > ... I wonder how long it | > would take to hack this into your typical abc2ps formatter? | | Well as Muse already has diamond, cross square (oh, and the usual ellipse) | for note heads, the answer is about minus three years for the formatting, | GUI editing, printing, etc.
;-) | For the playing - that might be a mess. Is there a *generally* *agreed* | meaning for these things? or is each drummer going to want it to look and | play *his* (or her) way? What I think Atte was hinting at is that it might not take all that much extending. Drummers have basically adapted conventional staff notation for their own purposes, and haven't made very many changes to the symbols. The motive for doing this is obvious. The printing industry has a lot invested in conventional music notation. Drummers give some symbols a slightly different interpretation, but you can say the same about other instrumentalists. Most of this could be handled naturally within abc by using a percussion clef as a sign to reset a lot of defaults. Another thing that already has precedent in abc is a staff with other than 5 lines. Someone (I wonder who ;-) has already implemented the medieval 4-line staff. This could be generalized easily within abc, by something like "clef=perc lines=2". The "lines=" clause would be generally useful for a number of other kinds of notation. If we combine this with the "middle=" clause that maps abc's letter notes to the staff, we have a quite general way of defining the displayed staff and where to draw the notes. (For even-lined staffs, the middle note would be mapped to the middle space, of course.) If we add to this a set of modifiers saying how to draw note heads, we'd have a general notation that could represent all sorts of music notation. We might want to get together a list of kinds of note heads, and give them !...! symbols. We could then use some simple macros to map them to however many 1-char modifiers we like. And we could define a few "clef=" terms that load a set of such macros. This doesn't seem like all that big a deal. ABC is pretty close to what we want already. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
