ANewman110 writes: | This looks fine using iabc, except that I think the cleff that you actually | want is | an octave lower. ... | > K:G clef=bass octave=-1
Yet another example of how confusing music terminology can be. Do you mean that you want a bass clef with a little '8' below? My abc2ps clone can do that; it would be written K:G clef=bass-8 I suspect that this is not what was meant, but I'm not sure. Another guess is that the writer fed the notation to a music player and wants it to sound an octave lower. This might be: K:G clef=bass octave=-2 Again, I'm not sure. Now, this is probably an example of "picky, picky, ...", but we are in part dealing with computers here. Those little monsters don't work very well unless you have very consistent and precise terminology. If not, what you get usually won't be at all what you thought you were asking for. One of the interesting discussions I've had since I foisted my abc tune finder on the world is the question of why I did it at all. Why not just use the big search sites? The answer is that, if you try to find music (that you can put on a music stand and read) on the web, you find that it is buried in 100 times as much music (that you put in your machine and sound comes out of the speaker). Now, you'd think that it would be easy to distinguish paper from sound. But it turns out that there is no English terminology to clearly distinguish the two. People are usually surprised at this, and often don't believe it. So I ask them to suggest keywords, and for each I explain how they will fail. If they still don't believe me, I just suggest "Try it; you'll find that it doesn't work." Musical terminology is incredibly confused, illogical, and ambiguous. Computers can't deal with it at all well. Many of the discussions here show a lot of the symptoms of this same problem. One of the worst is anything involving "transposition". Just ask a bunch of musicians to explain transposing instruments, and watch them degenerate to mass confusion as it becomes obvious that they aren't communicating with each other at all. (I've done this at times, and it's really funny to watch.) In the topic at hand, we see that even the simple case of octaves is really too complex for us to communicate clearly. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
