David Stocker wrote:
Hal Leonard, probably the largest single producer of TAB books uses a
note staff and TAB staff combination. It's my opinion that this is
the optimal way to display guitar music if you're using TAB because
it's the most unambiguous: music information is clear to
non-guitarists and fretboard position is clearly indicated which can
be significant on fretboard instruments to achieve certain effects
like campaƱella. The use of TAB avoids cluttering the note staff with
too many bits of information (like left-hand fingerings in addition
string number indications). If you're using a TAB staff with no note
staff, I think the best way is to use stems on the fret-numbers to
indicate rhythm. Dotted notes simply have a dot like on notes in a
note staff and white notes are indicated by placing a circle around
the 'notes'. It would be nice to see these features available in
LilyPond.
If the developers are interested, I'm able to provide many examples
of printed guitar tablature in various formats from various
publishers (I spend my work life in this area). I've talked about it
before on this list, but I'm interested working with other users to
increase LilyPond support for fretted-instrument tablature. I'm not a
programmer, so my contributions would be limited (at least at first)
to consulting on appearance and placement of elements.
Any comments on this great offer from David? Would be nice if
tablature in Lilypond would be improved...
Or do we need to sponsor such developments?
Kind regards,
\r