Re: [tablatures] Baroque lute tablature

["Trevor Daniels" <t.daniels@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marc Hohl wrote Sunday, November 15, 2009 7:11 PM


> Trevor Daniels schrieb:
> > a) Most of the glyphs needed to output Baroque lute tablature
> > would need to be designed.  The glyphs used for the fret 
> > indications
> > and bass courses I 'borrowed' from the Fronimo site - these would 
> > need
> > to be redesigned for LilyPond as the Fronimmo licence does not 
> > permit
> > commercial use.  The glyphs used for the durations are taken from 
> > the
> > standard LilyPond font set, but are not so beautiful as the 
> > Fronimo
> > durations; they could with advantage be redesigned but are OK for 
> > a
> > starter.  There are also a few more glyphs like the section 
> > separator
> > and end-of-piece indicator that would need to be designed.
> Some years ago, I worked with metafont, so implementing this font 
> seems
> to be doable, but a complete list of the signs needed in this font 
> would be
> crucial (I am not the fastest guy on earth with respect to 
> metafont, but
> I would like to give it a try).

OK, great!  I'd no idea how to do this, so that would
be very helpful.  We need to flesh out quite a bit more
of the design before we get to this stage though.

> > e) But the big lesson is that transcribing from tab to tab via
> > notemode is totally impractical.  I and many lutenists do not
> > know what pitch a particular fingering generates.  A tabmode 
> > entry
> > form will be essential.
>
> There are two situations: when you need *only* tablature output,
> you don't need to bother about the key signature, because it 
> doesn't show
> up in tablature. When you want lilypond to display normal notation
> in addition to the tablature, you'll have to set the key signature 
> for yourself,
> because (at least in my opinion) there is no algorithm which can 
> cover all
> situations in a satisfying way.

Agreed it is difficult, but Laura has suggested a possible
approach.

> A tablature input mode is very useful for electric guitar, too. 
> There are
> many situations where only tablature is needed, so the double 
> translation
> (fret board to notation for lilypond input and lilypond's 
> translation into
> tablature again) is just not straightforward.

Yes, that's exactly the problem.

> > This has some obvious difficulties,
> > the main one being the lack of information about how accidentals
> > should be represented when outputted in a standard staff.  Not
> > sure what to do about this.
>
> As Laura pointed out in her response, there are no accidentals in 
> tablature
> (this doesn't make sense in my opinion).

The difficulty only arises if a standard staff form is
required too.

> > OK, I've rambled on long enough.  What I want to know is whether
> > I should continue with this.
>
> Yes, please!

OK, I'll continue.

> > I'm confident we can produce acceptable
> > output from standard notemode input, but I'm equally confident
> > this would be of little use to lutenists without tabmode input.
> > I'm also confident tabmode input can be provided without too much
> > difficulty for Baroque lute, using letters to represent frets,
>
> Would it be too difficult to expand the input format to fret 
> numbers, so
> a user has a choice to use lute letters or fret numbers? This 
> would be
> a big step forward for lilypond.

To be frank I don't know at this stage how easy this
would be.  I was able to use letters to represent fret
numbers rather than pitch without changing the lexer/parser,
but this was just a private hack to make it easier to enter
some test cases.  If we decide to implement a genuine
tabmode input form it should be certainly be possible, but
I don't know what the problems would be.

Trevor