Re: PATCH: Improved tablature support

[Carl Sorensen]

On 7/20/09 3:09 PM, "Mark Polesky" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> 
> Marc Hohl wrote:
>> Hm, sounds kind of morbid to me, calling a note "dead", but since
>> I am not a native english speaker, I cannot judge this from a neutral
>> point of view.
>> Do you think that there will arise big problems with these commands?
>> I think \deadNotesOn and \deadNote are rather self-explanatory, so I don't
>> believe to confuse potential users.
> 
> I prefer "muted" rather than "dead". Though, the LilyPond internals
> can get kind of violent, especially with the Hara_kiri_engraver, and
> ly:grob-suicide! (whose docstring simply says "Kill grob"). I would
> rule that more as a homicide. By the way, I killed a grob once, just
> to watch him die.
> 
> - Mark
> ps. joking aside, I think "muted" is alot better.

After my previous post, I thought that the term in LilyPond ought to reflect
the most appropriate musical usage term, rather than what I think is the
best non-musical english term.

So I did a search for "dead note" and found that it is widely accepted in
the rock guitar world (which is the largest market for tablatures, I think).

The Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/

has an entry for "dead note" that consists solely of a link to the entry for
"false note"; both the guitar term "dead note" and the wind instrument term
"ghost note" point to the term false note.  But I can't find any other links
in the first few pages of Google to indicate that this VT usage is
commonly-accepted or widespread.

Wikipedia (in a poorly-cited article) uses the term "ghost note" for all
instruments (including the string-muted and palm-muted notes).  This entry
seems to indicate that "ghost note" is a term widely used with drums.

Following up on links to "ghost note" in the guitar world causes me to
believe that ghost notes in guitar are different than ghost notes in wind
instruments.  So I don't think that "ghost note" is a good universal term
either.

After this little search, I'm inclined to lean toward the Virginia Tech
answer -- use the "false note" term, since it's not used anywhere else, and
point it to "dead notes" for guitar and "ghost notes" for woodwinds.

If this were strictly a tablature issue, I'd say keep it at "dead notes",
since that is the guitar term.  But Marc's excellent patch also applies to
musical staffs, and those notating for woodwinds might want to use it as
well (although that can be done with an override, since it's not part of a
chord).

Anyway, what do you think we should do for this notation?

Thanks,

Carl








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