[abcusers] Re: Chord length - waaaah!

[Bryancreer]

Nobody is opposing the [abc]2 idea are they?  Can we take that as agreed and get onto the far more important business of different note lengths in one chord?

Irwin Oppenheim wrote -

>All the notes within a chord should have the same
>length. More complicated chords can be transcribed with
>the & operator, see section Voice overlay.

This was discussed about a year ago and it was generally accepted that you could have notes of different lengths in the same chord.  The issue, as John Chambers has mentioned, was which note represented the time elapsed before the following note - highest, lowest, longest, shortest...  I opted for first listed on the grounds that it was independant of the musical content.  Some agreed but others did not and (as usual) the dicussion reached no firm conclusion.  I went ahead and implemented it in Abacus on this basis.

For instance with L:1/4, [GD2] A B c would take four beats and [D2G] A B c would take five.

I do put notes of two different length on different stems.  I hate to think what would happen with notes of three different lengths.

I'm quite happy to implement the & (or whatever) notation as well but do not want to see what I've already done outlawed.

John Chambers wrote -

>Similarly, the [ce]>[Bd] case is very useful,  and  already
>works with some abc software.

It works with Abacus.

Bryan Creer