From: D. M. 'S. M. <ros...@gm...> - 2006-03-10 16:30:37
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On Friday 10 March 2006 9:30 am, Chris Cannam wrote: > category of question as how to determine that a pair of staffs should be a > loosely grouped confederation, a grand staff, etc, etc. Reminds me. I've been thinking about the grand staff as one unified object vs. grand staff as two independent segments/staffs joined together through some clickiness. I'm thinking that the gray area between the bottom of the treble staff and the top of the bass staff would probably be a lot easier to negotiate well if both staffs were in one unified object. > How would you envisage the user defining this stuff? I guess I'd see it happening at the SPB level, just because everything else happens at the SPB level currently. What you say about wanting to use the same kind of staff for the whole instrument (64:0 -> #3 -> Acoustic Guitar) is probably very much true, and this really represents a broader problem we've talked about a few times, but have not really settled on a way to deal with. Namely if I'm writing for a trumpet (imagine that) then I really want everything associated with this instrument to be born with -2 transposition, and maybe even the same color used for all newly minted segments too, so I can say trumpet is red, Horn is green, clarinet is purple, and have all new segments I draw use these colors once I've set it for one of them. There have been various discussions among the feature requests of ways to deal with this. I had a "backward looking segment pencil" idea, and some user had an idea for instrument templates, where you could pick a trumpet or a bass clarinet out of the list, and get features similar to the above, along with soft limits and warnings about how you are trying to exceed the playable range of the instrument for which you are writing. Thinking about that instrument template idea, I'd see something involving hard and soft bounds, along with the ability to bypass everything entirely. Maybe display notes at these bounds in false colors. Gray for notes that only a really good player can get to usefully, and red for notes that are purely in the realm of what MIDI can do, but real pieces of wood and metal can't. For trumpet, say, I'd put a soft floor at F# below the staff, a hard floor at the C below that, a soft ceiling at the first C on top of the staff, and a hard ceiling an octave or so above that. If you wrote higher than that, you'd be writing for someone really exceptionally good. Maybe users should have the ability to adjust these limits too. Someone writing for band students (me, for example) would perhaps want to narrow the range of notes that don't trigger a warning. For C flute, I'd put a soft floor at the first C below the staff, and a hard floor at the B below that, with a hard ceiling two Cs above the staff. Taking all of this back around to guitar, if we had such a beast as this instrument template idea, then it could easily include a library of standard fretted strings, and could comprise the sort of info needed for these instruments. Number of unique strings, standard number of frets, standard tuning. People would need to be able to tweak the number of frets and the tunings of the strings. There is much variation in scale length, and many people use non-standard tunings for assorted reasons. The need to support that goes back into making the hard and soft limits I spoke of above for winds something worth thinking about for fretted strings too. You probably wouldn't want to write music that specified a 21-fret guitar, but you could set 21 as a soft limit, and 23 or whatever the longest normal scale is as a hard limit. This data could then be used to create an appropriate tab, with the correct number of lines, and an awareness of what the fundamental pitch of each line is. Anyway, it wasn't my idea, and the guy who proposed this should feel to pipe up. It would need to take place at some level that just doesn't exist currently. Either in the IPB, or bound directly to the track as some other track-associated set of properties. (I think the original proposal also involves having the process of picking a trumpet template from this list create a sane trumpet instrument that's pre-dialed for the trumpet patch, which is worth throwing into this discussion.) Oh, and here's another interesting thought. We've been talking about guitars so far, but what about diatonic strings like the mountain dulcimer? That's getting into gravy territory, but as someone who plays one of these things, it would be way cool to be able to write tab for it, and to have Rosegarden realize that it can only play modal music in a given key. Maybe the fret numbering algorithm could automatically write a sharp as a pitch bend of the base pitch fret, and a flat as a pitch bend of the fret lower in pitch. Not that most people play these with their fingers anyway, or do pitch bends, but... Oh, I don't know. It's gravy wouldn't that be neat territory. Worth throwing out in case someone thinks about it three years from now when we're out of better things to do. -- D. Michael 'Silvan' McIntyre ---- Silvan <dmm...@us...> Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 Author of Rosegarden Companion http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ |