11 Mar
2009
11 Mar
'09
9:22 a.m.
I'd be interested in taking a look at your code, It should help get my brain
working. I'd also be interested in feedback from you if your interested to
critique my approach.
Nathanael
About ten years ago (on Atari/MiNT) I wrote a C program
similar to this,
but
for baroque lute tabulature... I wanted it to help me
transform any
midifile
I was interested in, be it classical orchestral or
chamber works, piano
works
or pieces for classical guitar, in a semi-automatic
way, to Wayne Cripp's
lutetab code, and it worked out surprisingly good, given that I was a
lousy DIY hacker ;) (I don't really code anymore).
I didn't care much about 2) and 3) but for 1) I came up with an algorithm
like
this:
- determine the string on which the pitch can be played at the lowest fret
possible
- check if this string is used already, and if yes move this note to the
next
(lower) string
For notes lower than the instrument range (13 course lute goes down to A, a
5th
lower than guitar) I chose to just place a comment in
the tab output, so
that I
would be able to decide afterwards what to do with that
note (transpose up
an
octave, skip it, whatever).
Since it's been a long time now I can't remember how I dealt with files
containing more than one track, but I somehow managed to merge them into a
single tabulature, I have for example produced nice tabulatures of the
accompaniment of the first three movements of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.
For these of course I had to prepare the midifiles, remove the voice tracks
and transpose to a key suitable to the lute.
Other problems I've encountered and I'm not sure if or how I solved them:
- the bar/beat counting got screwed up sometimes, especially with grace
notes
- of course, I had to remove double notes when boiling
down ensemble works
- there are different lute tunings, I only dealt with standard baroque
d-minor tuning
- on the lute, the diatonic basses (lower than the 6th course) are tuned
to
the key of the piece
The thing is based on the ancient midifile(3) lib by Tim Thompson et al.
which
is a little gem IMHO. The library parses the midifile,
all you have to do
is
to write a few callback functions for the events
you're interested in. Some
example code is in the archive, and it took me just a few days to come up
with
something useful.
I never seriously thought about releasing it, even after I compared it's
output's quality to what Django can do (an impressive M$ tabulature editor,
mainly for historic fretted instruments, the demo from
http://musickshandmade.com/lute/pages/django runs quite well in wine) and
found that I was doing pretty well. :)
I'm sure there are stupid things in there and it's not at all in a
releasable
state, but if you are interested I'll share the
code...