Re: quarter-tone tablatures notation

[David Kastrup]

Thomas Morley <address@hidden> writes:

> 2015-10-25 8:34 GMT+01:00 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>> Thomas Morley <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Hi Bernardo,
>>>
>>> please see attached. Does it fit your needs?
>>
>> What's the essential difference to the current code?
>>
>> --
>> David Kastrup
>
> Current `determine-frets' from scm/translation-functions.scm checks
> whether the calculated fret is an integer. If not, it throws a warning
> and doesn't print it.
> At first glance this makes sense, because there are no frets for
> quarter-tones on a fretted instrument like guitar (in standad-tuning).

Well, "in standard-tuning" is the point.  As originally requested, the
idea was to have some strings tuned to a quartertone offset, and then
determine-frets was supposed to use those.

> Though, ofcourse you can produce the quarter-tone pitch via bending,
> which then is not represented in the tab.
>
> Basically I changed it to check for (truncate fret) and removed the
> according warning (letting the warning for negative frets in place).

But that would then _not_ pick quarter-tone tuned strings unless it
happened to find them before the others, right?

I don't think that we can solve this satisfactorily without _scoring_
found combinations and picking best score.  Or at least make separate
passes with increasingly relaxed conditions, only taking the next pass
when the previous one fails.

Issue 703 suffers from the same problem: I found a viable solution
(patch is in the issue) that would always work as opposed to the default
solution, but that was not accepted by banjo players since the default
is the better solution _iff_ it works.

The fallback solution as opposed to a finer-grained scoring solutions
would have the advantage that it is pretty much predictable, so the
danger that the unhelped fingering is given a different assignment from
one version to the next is slim.  Of course, with the disadvantage that
a scored version will usually be better.  Particularly if there is a
score for fingers retained from the last chord.

-- 
David Kastrup