Overview of work this week

I’ve added further missing features to the GPX format, including palm mute, artificial harmonics, barre annotations, let ring annotation, tap, slap and pop markings, and text markings. I’ve also started support on a few others (see the bullet pointed section lower down).

I’ve also taken a look again at the representation for slides and moved the implementation for slides which operate on one note to use the ChordLine mechanism. I have just added a straight property to ChordLine values, which if set to true will create a straight line denoting some kind of slide (various kinds of available slides were discussed in a previous post).  Legato slides are also now working properly. The framework for legato slides also borrows from the slur machinery, and so there is now also partial support in the GPX format for slurs. Slurs are something that I will be implementing fully this week.

I’m preparing a pull request for the slides feature at the moment, and as this is branched from (an older version of) the GPX work branch, this pull request will also contain some new features relating to GPX that have been discussed previously, up to the point where I started working on slides. This will include the guitar pro implementation being split up into various separate files. When the slides PR is merged I’ll do the PR containing the rest of the work I have right now on the GP6 format so others can play with it as they wish.

The current list of features which are not supported in at least one version of Guitar Pro are:

  • Slides (possibly complete, needs further testing).
  • Free time (in progress).
  • Ghost notes (needs testing).
  • Fermatas.
  • Ottava markings for individual notes.
  • Directions.
  • Natural harmonics.
  • Rasgueado.
  • Slurs (in progress).
  • Tremolo bars.
  • Vibrato.
  • Volume swell.

The longest of these to implement will probably be natural harmonics (if I remember correctly new symbols are needed for that) and maybe also fermatas (due to the way they are represented in the files).

Key tasks that stalled

None this week.

Overview of work for next week

Again, I’m just to add support for as many of the missing features that I can, and finish of testing then push support for slides.  Free time and ghost notes I would like to finish, along with slurs. The rasgueado marking should be straight-forward to do, and the ottava markings I would hope wouldn’t take long either. After those I’ll likely target volume swell, directions, and vibrato if there’s time.