Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I know tuba players are used to reading a bunch of ledger lines below the staff -- tuba is written at pitch -- but is that true of most other bass players? I've only ever seen bass guitar and double bass music written an octave higher than pitch, and was actually rather startled the one time I had to deal with non-transposed sheet music on the bass guitar (there's a tuba tune in the middle of the bass book for Bye Bye Birdie). I figured other bassists were as unaccustomed to that as I am, but if I'm mistaken about that then yeah, that'd help readability (for everyone but me -- but I can tweak my personal copy to match my idiosyncrasies regardless of how I publish it).

(By the way, is "FF clef" a name you'd seen elsewhere for octave-transposed-F-clef, or something you made up on the fly? It makes a Whole Lot O' Sense to me, but I don't remember having seen it before? Seems like a useful nomenclature.)

Switching back and forth between treble and bass clefs (but still treating it as a transposing instrument) wouldn't any more difficult than marking a section 8va, if that's actually an improvement (I suspect it might be; I'm hoping for feedback on that point). That's something I was already considering. Writing the whole thing on the grand staff would (unless I've missed something clever in the ABC 2.0 draft spec or options to abcm2ps) be a lot more work, but I think probably only on the order of a half-hour or an hour. I wouldn't be thrilled at doubling the page count, but I won't lose sleep over it.

I'm sure the grand staff (piano-style) would be a kindness to pianists wanting to get an idea of how the piece sounds (or to adapt it for piano), so I dunno, maybe I should go ahead and post a version that way and give bassists a chance to compare the two for readability. I'm also not sure how many non-bassists are trying to read this (at least a few, I'm sure) or what other instruments it'll sound decent on. (Personally, notes that high on the bass slow down my reading no matter what clef they're represented in -- I'm glad I'm on the writing end of this one instead. While I read standard notation a whole lot more quickly than tabulature most of the time, when I get that far up the neck tab starts being helpful. I suspect that the "Right Way" to notate this piece is going to be "magazine style" -- a standard notation staff directly over the same notes in tab. And doing that in ABC is going to be interesting. Perhaps it's time for me to learn an engraving system that supports the parallel notation better. I wonder how Lillypond is at that.)

There's talk on the ABC users mailing list about making a browser plug-in for ABC notation. I've been thinking about that, and the more I think about it the more I like the idea of having controls on the plug-in to let the user override some of the author's engraving decisions -- octave, clef, etc. (For that matter, give the user a transposition control; once you're parsing and rendering ABC anyhow, on-the-fly transposition and part-extraction ought to be a gimme ... I think.) And the more I try to figure out how to make "Samhain Eve" optimally readable, the more I like the idea of just sticking the ABC on the web rather than a picture of the pages, and letting each viewer optimize it for herself. (I will, of course, post the ABC somplace and put a link to it here, so folks who already have notation software or consider this the Round Tuit to install some can tweak the output as they like.)

Thanks for the suggestions. Keep the advice coming.