[OT]Re: Lute tablature

[Michal Seta]

On Tue, 20 May 2003 21:06:15 -0400
William wrote:

> This whole subject would be considerably reduced in breadth if one
> simple thing can be understood: lute tab is not banjo tab. It isn't
> the popular internet guitar tab either.

This is true.  And I think that lilypond's tablature is quite limited. 
I am not an expert on tabs, neither am I a programmer but perhaps
someone will, someday, implement a nice set of tab tools.  In the
meantime I use lilypond's tablature to tab music for guitar and viola da
gamba.  I (the guitarist) and the gamba player can also both read
standard notation on our respective instruments, even using various
tunings.  The problem came when we got into microtonal music, changed
the string tunings to fifths and messed around with fret distances
(piece of cake on the gamba).

Now I tab both instruments in lilypond and reading numbers instead of
letters didn't seem to be a big problem for my partner who's been
reading mostly from historical tablatures for gamba.  He used to play
guitar, though, so maybe that helped.

In my search for a nice looking tab I came across this:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute/AboutTab.html

and I think this should keep purists satisfied.

cheers.

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