Jack Campin writes: | > Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as | > I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard | > mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the | > left hand is probably much of this. | | I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - | while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people | do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. | My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in | the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, | and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity | material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed.
It has always seemed to me that musicians should react the other way. After all, right-handers who play stringed instruments always seem to want to use their left hand for the fingerboard. And if you're a keyboard player, I'd think you would of necessity be fairly ambidextrous. I usually put a mouse on whichever side is most convenient. I find that switching sides with the mouse doesn't take any thought; I just do it. This seems to surprise a lot of people when they notice it. But I'd think that a keyboard player would just react by asking "What sort of keyboards do you play?" | What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the | right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it | would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, a clever abc editor might have an option to keep track of the tonic from the K: lines, and map 1-7 to notes in the obvious way. You'd use 0 for a rest. Maybe you could use the + and - keys on the keypad to do octave shifts. Actually, you want lengths, too. So maybe you could use the shift key to select between 1-7 meaning notes and lengths. Then, with the left-hand shift key, you could enter notes and lengths entirely with the right hand. You'd still need to move your hand for bar lines, I suppose. It might be worth experimenting with. -- O <:#/> John Chambers + <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> / \ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
