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Re: Barre grob - appearance
From: |
Jeff Olson |
Subject: |
Re: Barre grob - appearance |
Date: |
Mon, 29 Aug 2022 15:20:37 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.13.0 |
On 8/27/2022 5:36 AM, Thomas Morley wrote:
Ofcourse, one can find several
codings here on the list, in LSR, I have some own as well. All are
(ab)using spanners like TextSpanner or hijacking other grobs like
Arpeggio.
As an old amateur guitarist, I'm looking forward to a better barre
solution. Thank you, Harm, for taking this on!
In the mean time there are existing solutions that are NOT based on
spanners.
The system I've been using for years is based on the similarities of
barres and position indicators. Both are indicators for overall
placement of the hand along the neck. Both typically use Roman
numerals. Both occupy the same visual space above the staff, and hence
both are read by the eye like the different words in the same sentence
about "Where do I put my hand?". The more detailed question of "Where
do I put my fingers?" is handled as a separate issue using Arabic
numerals within the staff.
The system is easily described, as in this footnote to the reader:
Roman numerals above the staff indicate hand positions on the
fretboard and remain in effect until the
next such indication. A barre is indicated by prefixing the Roman
numeral with a small “b_” for a small
barre or a large “B_” for a large barre at that position.
Admittedly, this system alone isn't going to express all the nuances in
your inner barre examples, but my arrangements are for intermediate
guitarists, and they seem to catch on to it quickly (and most, like me,
can scarcely do an inner barre).
Implementation in lilypond is trivial, by including definitions like these:
% guitar neck position indicators
pI = ^\markup { "I" }
pII = ^\markup { "II" }
pIII = ^\markup { "III" }
pIV = ^\markup { "IV" }
% large barre
BpI = ^\markup { "B_I" }
BpII = ^\markup { "B_II" }
BpIII = ^\markup { "B_III" }
BpIV = ^\markup { "B_IV" }
% small barre
bpI = ^\markup { "b_I" }
bpII = ^\markup { "b_II" }
bpIII = ^\markup { "b_III" }
bpIV = ^\markup { "b_IV" }
The resulting code is very compact and stands out nicely in
Frescobaldi's color highlighting, as shown in the attached image
alt-barre-frescobaldi.png.
The output appearance from this same example is shown in the attached
alt-barre-appearance.png. This is from a lengthy arrangement for two
guitars I published five years ago, which is why it was intentionally
crowded to reduce the page count. In some of the cases shown, I had to
cheat on the placement of the position indicators, e.g. in m44.
I'm hoping that whatever solution you create will play well with other
grobs in crowded situations. As you mentioned two weeks ago, "Notation
of classical guitar is one of the most complex ones". There's already a
lot of other important visual clutter, even in the simple example I've
attached (e.g. slurs and beams on the same notes under the barre).
Reminds me of Alice's Restaurant
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Restaurant> "... with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back ... explaining what each one was
...". We just don't want our creations "... to be used as evidence
against us". :-)
Jeff
alt-barre-appearance.png
Description: PNG image
alt-barre-frescobaldi.png
Description: PNG image