Tablature rests at incorrect vertical position

Do you have a source / reference for saying one is "right" and the other "wrong"? To me, LilyPond looks wrong - i direct violation of Gould p. 35. Unless there are some special rules for tablature that cause the normal rest positioning to be thrown out - like the fatc that the rests are a different size relative to the staff lines. But even so, I still think ours look better. So in the absnece of a specific authoritative reference, I think this should be closed "by design" and one of the few places where we can say we beat LilyPond :-)

Tablautre or not has little to do with it. It should be a simple matter of how the a rest is supposed to be positioned relative to a staff line. It has to do with how the various parts of the rest match up - whether they are supposed to above, on, or below the line. What throws thing off isn't the fact that it's tablature; it's the fact that the staff lines are farther apart than normal, but the rests don't get bigger to compensate. So if you are basing your sense of how the rest is supposed to align with staff lines on what is going on with the top of the rest, you get a different answer than if you base that opinion on what is going on in the middle or at the bottom.

For me, I'd summarize it this way:

Rests, like notes, are defined in terms of their relationship to the lines and spaces. A little black rectangle sitting on top of a staff line means one thing (half rest); the same rest hanging below the line means something very different (whole rest). This is an absolutely fundamental relationship that must not change just because the lines are farther or apart or because there is an even rather than odd number of lines. Half rests sit above a line or they aren't half rests. Whole rests hang below lines or they aren't whole rests. That much is obvious. To me, it is just as obvious that the same principle applies to other rest types. A quarter rest s defined to *center* on a line. It always does so on a standard staff even when moved up or down, even if made small. Quarter rests should always by default center on a line. Same with eight rests.

I think LilyPond and some of your examples are doing it wrong - they are centering to the *staff* center, not to a particular *line*, but the staff center is a space not a line, for tab staves with 4 or 6 lines. You can sort of get away with this incorrect centering - centering on a space for quarter and eighth rests - but it would of course be disastrous for half rests, which would bnow looking like whole rests hanging from the line above. So you *have* to move half rests either up or down to one line or another. And whichever way you move them, you must move other rests as well. A quarter half rest should occupy the same vertical position as the upper portion of a quarter rests; a whole rest should occupy the same vertical position as the lower portion. That type of visual cue an important part of how we read music. Yet if you leave quarter rests centered on the space but move a half rest down to the line below, now if looks like a whole rest in that it occupies the same space as the bottom portion of the quarter rest.

And so on. I mean, if someone has published guidelines that contradict Gould's and give reaosn why they think the common sense of her guidelines - as also expanded upon by men abovbe - are somehow contradicted by some other new as-yet-unexplained logic that is more important, I'd certian be willing to lsiten. But to me, it is quite obviously more logically sound to keep rests anchored to lines, not spaces, for the reason i have explained, and I am quite sure these are the reasons Gould was alluding to. They don't cease to hold just because the numebr of lines or line spacing changes.

In most lute tab I have encountered, the rhythm signs are in the form of simple flags above the staff, often beamed together. Less commonly, they look like regular notes, in which case, a note value is meant to stay on subsequent chords until replaced by another.

I would like to see implemented the possibility of entering all the rhythm flags first *above* the staff and then going back to enter the tab letters or numbers on the staff under the rhythm flags. Last I checked in with MuseScore, this had not been done. I would also like to see the possibility of either having a rhythm flag for each chord ("filled") or only when the rhythm changes ("cleaned"). If rhythm flags are filled, then they can be beamed in patterns that clarify the rhythm (see attached). Also, to indicate a rest, you have a rhythm flag with no note under it. A rhythm flag at the end of a bar can be tied to a "rest" rhythm flag at the beginning of the next to indicate a note or chord held across the bar.

--Sarge

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