Kristian Nørgaard asked: | Is it possible to write a part of the melody with smaller notes than | then rest. | This is often used when you want to show a short melodyline, which isn't | part of the main melodi. | | It should show up in the same staff as the rest.
John Chambers responded:
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The idea was that you could then write {1C2DE F3G}AB and the C2DE F3G notes would follow the rules for ordinary notes, but would be drawn with very small notes. To get the Baroque-style measured ornaments, you could write something like |{2d3c}c6 d2|, for example. The d3c notes would be drawn larger than grace notes, and would have the correct lengths, though of course they would take away from the 6 counts of the "real" c6 note.
And, of course, one of the reactions of most other musicians would be that this is idiotic notation which nobody in their right mind would ever even want to use. But the Baroque crowd would be happy.
I purchased a book of fiddle tunes (not Baroque fiddle tunes, in case you might wonder ;) ) only this past weekend which uses both grace notes of varying length within a single ornament and smaller notes to show short melody lines not part of the main melody. The smaller notes are used to show when a fiddler might play a non-melody note on an string adjacent to the string on which the melody note is played (and of course to show what note is played).
There are abc transcriptions where unisons occur only few times in a given piece. It may be of interest to a non-fiddler to know which note in each case is the melody note. If we make the assumption that the melody note is always the note of highest pitch, then there is no problem, but in the case of this particular book that I am speaking of, there are many cases where the non-melody note is higher pitched than the melody note, sometimes in many note phrases that also contain non-melody notes lower than the melody note. This could leave the non-fiddler with a fairly large number of choices in figuring out the proper melody (of course, since there is usually no standard version of a fiddle tune, I suppose that very few would get too worked up if the non-fiddler just picked notes, as long as the result sounds good).
Is your notation meant for grace note phrases only? Otherwise, how might you use the notation you describe above to show different note sizes for notes played at the same time, rather than as a kind of grace note? Say for example if at some point in a tune I want to write [GB], but I want to make it clear that G is the melody note and B is the non-melody note, and thus I want B to be smaller. What would I do?
Randy.
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