Re: [tablatures] Baroque lute tablature

[Carl Sorensen <c_sorensen@xxxxxxx>]

Trevor,

This is beautiful.  Thanks for getting started on this!


On 11/16/09 4:50 AM, "Trevor Daniels" <t.daniels@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> 
> Marc Hohl wrote Sunday, November 15, 2009 7:11 PM
> 
> 
>> Trevor Daniels schrieb:
> 
>>> 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.

I realize it's early on this, but you may want to consider the possibility
of a "note indicator" on tabmode input.  This would override the standard
function for a particular tab entry, just like we currently have a string
indicator on notes in order to override the standard tab calculation.

>>> 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.

I don't know what the problems might be, either.  I think that allowing
numbers to be the start of a "note" may cause problems with shift/reduce
conflicts in the parser.  I'd expect it to be easier to start with the
implementation of letters for fret indications.

At any rate, I think it's fantastic that you've decided to get working on
this!  Thanks a million!

Carl