>> HP & Hp are scale specific rather than instrument specific. You can
>> play a pipe tune on a fiddle provided you know what the pipe mode is.
> Fair enough. Can you point me to any documentation and/or examples of
> their use?
Look at the pipe tunes in my Dalkeith music page:
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/dalkeith/Dalkeith.htm
where you get GIFs, QT movies and MIDIs to compare with the ABC,
and I did the conversions myself so I know they're what I meant.
(not all those tunes have the gracenotes but "Lord John Scott's
March" does, for one).
I used the Hp signature rather than HP - the difference is that
Hp uses an explicit signature two sharps and a natural while HP
leaves it implicit (as is done in practice in pipe tune books).
Unless your intended audience is pipers exclusively, Hp is safer;
I've heard fiddlers trying to play off an army pipe tune score
and ending up with something like "The Barren Rocks of Aden" in
D dorian because they didn't understand the notation.
The important thing is the way gracenotes and melody notes are
distinguished typographically: melody notes are all stem-down and
gracenotes are all stem-up. (And are never slurred to melody notes
the way abc2ps insists on it, except in a couple of freakishly
eccentric scores). Except in pibroch, all gracenotes in pipe
music should have triple stems/beams; BarFly gets this wrong, and
consequently so do all my examples. BarFly also makes some semi-
intelligent decisions about how to play pipe tunes based on that
signature.
This feature was a design mistake in ABC; it would have been better
as an attribute that could be added to the key signature rather
than forming the *whole* key signature. There is no way in ABC of
saying both that a tune needs pipe-style gracenote handling and is
also in B minor, unless you put the mode information in a comment.
Or for a *really* obscure reason to separate it out, there are some
early pipe tune books written as if the range of the instrument were
C-d with an implicit one-sharp signature. It looks just like normal
pipe music only two spaces down. (I suspect the reason for this was
so the Army could turn flute players into pipers more easily in the
period after the Napoleonic War when the fife was being superseded -
notated D on the fife (actually B flat) was six-fingers-down, like
notated A (actually B flat) in modern pipe music). If HP were a key
attribute rather than a key, this could be specified as "K:D Mix HP".
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