Hand notation for drums?

• Jul 5, 2011 - 09:43

Firstly, I love Musescore! Great job!
I am struggling to find any way of notating which hand plays what on drums. This is generally done by writing R or L above the appropriate notes, and is essential for rudimental drumming/some marching stuff.
Am I missing something, or if not can you recommend a way that I can put it in afterwards?
Thanks,
Alex

Comments

• Jul 5, 2011 - 09:48

There are several ways. You could use a staff text for example. Select a notehead and press Ctrl + T then enter R or L. You can then copy paste the text to other notehead.

Reply

• Jul 5, 2011 - 10:02

Great, thanks so much! There's so much you can do with Musescore that some stuff gets lost in the shuffle!
I am using this to help notate a book I've written and will share it here when it's finished to show what is possible with the program.
Many thanks.

Reply

• Oct 15, 2011 - 17:34

is there a way to put the right hand's notes above the percussion line and the left hand below? That's how we've always written it in my pipes and drums corps. also since I play tenor I add symbols for my flourishes, is there a way to put lyrics above as well as below?

Thanks

Reply

• Oct 15, 2011 - 19:28

Not that I can think of, but if you use lyrics for below and chords for above, and custom the text styles to make sure the fonts and sizes match, that should work.

Actually, if you put the lyrics above, you could force some to below by entering them as like the 8th verse or something, which would probably show up below the staff. But I don't think that would actually work out well in practice.

Reply

• Oct 16, 2011 - 02:17

Wow, that seems odd to me. Could you send a pdf of an example of music? I have seen notation where the note heads are placed higher and lower on the staff to represent right and left stickings, but not the actual "R" and "L" notation. I'm afraid I can't think of a solution for that, except get it set up on a couple of notes with the appropriate text and copy and paste every single note. But that seems excessive, even for a CTRL+C, CTRL+V junkie like myself.

Anyway, post an example of what you are trying to do, and maybe we can figure out a shortcut or something.

Reply

• Oct 17, 2011 - 00:57

That's the trouble, everything I have is hand written, hence my desire to put it in musescore.
to explain myself more clearly, there is one line in the staff. the notes for the right hand sit on top of the line and the left hand notes hang from it. I would prefer to not have to use ctl-L & ctl-T for sticking as that's where I put my flourish symbols. I will try to see if any of the other drummers in the corps has an e-version of anything.

Reply

• Oct 17, 2011 - 02:17

Okay, I think I get it. You wish to express the sticking in terms of note head position, instead of having "R" "L" "R" "L" written on the staff.

The fix on this is actually quite simple. What I would do is add an instrument to the instuments.xml file for "pipe band snare drum" or some other name. The instrument file can define a single staff line, and the actual note positions can be set either above or below the staff. So when you add that instument, the drum pallette would show you two notes... "RH" with the note in one position, and "LH" with the note in the other position.

Let me ask you a few more questions to make sure we get it right:

1. What note positions define the sticking... do the stems face up or down, or opposite directions?
2. What is the SOUND you wish to make (loose mylar, tight kevlar)
3. What are the range of effects used (e.g. rim shots, buzzes, shell hits, stick clicks etc..)

Again, even a scan of the hand written score would be helpful.

Reply

• Oct 17, 2011 - 02:34

How exactly would I add a new instrument? is there a way to modify an existing one? The sound is not really that important. the tenor drum is like a small tom. so the mid tom sound is fine. Essentially I'm trying to make more professional looking copies of the scores we've developed and written by hand. for the snare it would be tight kevlar. and we use flams, singles, doubles, paradiddles, buzzes, rolls. None of our scores include rim shots or shell hits...yet. we're not THAT cool. lol I really would just like to adjust the head position for now. I'm working on getting an e-copy of anything. I'll post that when I do.

Reply

• Oct 17, 2011 - 13:14

Editing the Drum Palette is covered in my Video Tutorial on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvVBHW-O5Ww

In this case I was editing the 5 line Drumset but this will apply to any of the Unpitched Percussion instruments.

The only caveat is that you wont be able to add a sound twice, so to indicate sticking, you will need to define two different MIDI notes, one for right and one for left.

A followup video on how to save the changes for use in other scores is coming shortly - as soon as I've got rid of this cold and can talk again :)

HTH
Michael

Reply

• Oct 17, 2011 - 21:31

Thanks so much Michael, That's exactly what I was looking for. wow. the guys in the corps will be impressed. (as will my Pipe major)

also Is there a way to do this for the grace notes? we need to indicate sticking for them as well. we use them to indicate flams. right now they go in the same place as the note they are attached to, I want to put them on the other hand

here is one of our scores

Attachment Size
CaberF1024.jpg 541.46 KB

Reply

• Oct 17, 2011 - 21:52

Now that presents a problem in MuseScore currently, as a grace note has to be attached to a main note.

They can, however be moved by dragging once you have attached them, although I'm not sure whether this works in Drum parts.

Will experiment and let you know.

Reply

• Oct 18, 2011 - 17:40

That's a cool tune, totally old school. I don't see very many 7-stroke rolls anymore, especially teamed up with single stroke 32nd notes. With so much emphasis on the up-tempo stuff in American DCI/WGI, the 7-stroke is usually just considered a triplet base at 170bpm. I can't wait to see how this turns out on musescore!

I have done a little tinkering, but the final product will take some time, as my home computer is being rebuilt and the laptop and internet connection are out of town with my Wife. Bottom line is it may take a week or two for me to write something that could be considered "polished". In the meantime, I'm forced to do some tinkering on the sly at work with my completely non-approved v0.9 installation of musescore.

Anyway, try this code and paste it into your "instruments.xml" file in the "templates" folder. You will want to insert it under the percussion section. It should set you up to have two independent "L" and "R" hand notes on a single staff line. No sound associated yet... although when you play it back it may trigger a non-percussion sample. So just be prepared for that suprise... it may be quite silly.

The flams are a different matter, as another post said because they are associated with a "principal" note. You may be forced to adjust them by hand as otherwise described. I just can't think of another way around it.

Last but not least, feel free to download an instrument file with drumline samples at my website http://sites.google.com/site/mhsbulldogdrumline. If you tinker with the "instruments.xml" file, you can figure out quite a bit (that's how I learned). The attached soundfont also has kevlar snare drum sounds, so if that's in line with sound you are looking for then just let me know and I will be sure to incorporate it. Again, it will probably be a few weeks.

Sincerely,

Mike S.

Attachment Size
SnareDrum.txt 356 bytes

Reply

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.