Re: Why don't we get rid of \chordmode?

[Carl Sorensen]

On 4/28/10 5:38 AM, "David Kastrup" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> 
> Hi, from a user perspective, chordmode is unnecessary and restricted.
> You can't combine different voices (in particular for adding bass
> notes), you can't write chords and bass notes together, you can't put
> non-chorded material in between, relative mode is not possible (like for
> chord progressions) and so forth and so on.
> 
> But when specifying a chord with colon syntax, the input can't be
> confused with a normal music expression.  The only distinguishing
> feature of chordmode is that specifying a pitch _without_ colon will
> generate a major triad, and that the octave is one higher than normal.
> 
> That's not enough of a distinction to keep it around.  Just let normal
> music mode accept chords with : notation, and \chordmode is unnecessary
> and can be deprecated.
> 
> ly-convert can then turn \chordmode into \transpose c c' and make sure
> that every pitch spec has a colon attached to it: c: is a legal chord
> specifier.

What effect would this have on the parser?  I think that I like this idea,
even though I didn't at first thought.  As long as it can work with the
parser, I can't see any downside.

> 
> To make this slightly prettier, one can reserve the modifier M
> (uppercase) for "major", then c:M can be written for a major chord,
> looking slightly better than just c: would.

I would NOT be in favor of this.  I don't like having two different meanings
depending solely on the case of a letter.  If we really don't want to have
c: stand for a major triad, then I think we should have c:maj stand for a
major triad, and need the 7 to be maj7.  Although this is potentially
confusing, a convert-ly rule could easily be written.

Have you been working on a patch for this?

Carl