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helge17 / tuxguitar

Improve TuxGuitar and provide builds
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Bass Guitar is a transposing instrument? #344

Closed belfie13 closed 2 weeks ago

belfie13 commented 2 months ago

I just found out why Logic writes bass guitars one octave higher, apparently they are a transposing instrument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposing_instrument

So bass guitars (and other instruments) are written at concert pitch but they sound 1 octave lower.

I'm not sure if we should do anything about it, unless the majority of other apps do the same then maybe we should?

https://www.logicprohelp.com/forums/topic/94602-logics-default-is-middle-c-as-c3-solved/?do=findComment&comment=536325

guiv42 commented 2 months ago

It's the same for guitar.

I'm not sure if we should do anything about it

I don't understand your point. Since TuxGuitar is a guitar-oriented software it just considers this implicitly, but the behavior is correct. For sure if you want to create a piano track in TuxGuitar it will sound 1 octave too low, but as far as I understood it was not Julian's intention to create a general-purpose music software. And I'm perfectly fine with this strategy: keep TuxGuitar as it is, just a tablature editor.

If we want to be more rigorous, the only think we could do I think is to show explicitly on the score this 1-octave shift. The usual way to do this is to draw an "eight" digit just below the clef (see this example). If someone understands the related code... (I don't)

belfie13 commented 2 weeks ago

oh it only matters when importing and exporting other formats and i'm not sure if it does, I can't reproduce the issue