Re: Tab ?

[Richard Schoeller]

Han-Wen,

GuitarTab, BassGuitarTab certainly make sense.  I haven't seen tab for
twelve string, but it might be out there.  It certainly won't hurt to
have it.  5 string basses are common enough that you might want to
handle those explicitly.  I would not bother with 6 strings (or more)
basses or 7 string guitars.

FiveStringBanjo makes sense too, but you might need some additional
conventions to control it.  First off, the 5th string not a low note, it
is actually a high drone.  It only reaches to the 8th fret.  It is never
(well almost never) fingered.  Instead it is played open.  So any rule
for assigning to it should only assign the correct open note.

The second problem is that there is heavy use of alternative tunings and
capos on the banjo, especially in clawhammer style.  The most common
tuning is gDGBD (the lower case first letter g signifying the drone). 
Banjo tab will generally have something like the following about where
the tempo description would be:

   Capo: 2
   Tuning: gDGBD

I think that supporting capoing and alternative tunings on top of a base
instrument description might be useful.  It makes constructing the
template for this a little easier.

I don't know if music for the various 4 string banjos is generally
written in tab or not.  Anyone?  How about mandolin, mandola or
bouzouki?

There is another thing that I have found to be a nuicance when scoring
for tab.  With the guitar and bass guitar it is common to put
conventional notation and tab together.  If you do this from the same
notes, you either give control of string choices over to lilypond
(almost always a bad move) or you get a slew of warnings about how the
string selection is being ignored when the notes are included in the
conventional staff.  Because the warning is done in 2 lines of output, I
can't even get rid of all the junk by piping stderr to grep -v.  Could
you eliminate those warnings?

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 15:04, address@hidden wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 18:31:44 +0200
> From: Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden>
> Subject: Tab ? 
> To: address@hidden
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> 
> A question for the string players out there: would it make sense to
> make separate Tab contexts for different instruments, i.e.
> 
>   \context GuitarTab
>   \context BanjoTab
>   \context FourStringTab
>   \context TwelveStringGuitarTab
> 
> If yes, what different Tab Staves are needed, and what are their
> characteristics (tuning, string ordering, etc.)
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen
> 

-- 
Dick Schoeller
mailto:address@hidden
http://schoeller.ne.client2.attbi.com/
781.449.5476

"Er ist ein Narr, der meint, es sei nicht schad, das Kind
auszuschutten mit dem Bad"         - Thomas Murner 1512