WORK IN PROGRESS

Drums + Percussion

It is not meant for drum kits or multi-sound drums with advanced finger technique, like Tabla or frame drums. Furthermore, a transcription part can (currently) only refer to a single drum, so for one player playing multiple drums, separate parts must be used.

Concept and Limitations

Some guiding ideas were:

• Where appropriate, describe the player's perspective rather than the sonic result – namely what each hand does to produce the sound.
• Pragmatism over conceptional purity

Caveats

The capabilities of the playback engine only go so far. It is meant as an aid for learning and proof-listening, not to produce faithful reproductions. Furthermore, the sampled sounds may be altered or exchanged at any point.

Many essential aspects, such as groove, micro timing, and nuanced expression, are missing. Ideally, transcriptions should always be accompanied by audio recordings of a human player.

Notation basics

The part above has two rows for the right and left hand (R and L). The first six pulses are open tones o O O! in three velocities (soft, normal, accent), which are available for all sounds.

Next comes a slap flam, notated as simultaneous accented slaps of both hands S! S! – which strictly speaking is incorrect because the hands hit with a small delay. However, simultaneous identical strokes make little sense, so they are pragmatically used to denote flams.

Finally, there is a combination O pu where the right hand plays four open tones, and the other elbow pushes on the skin. pu is a modifier symbol, producing no sound on its own.

How and how hard the skin is pushed goes beyond the notation, so there is an annotation on the first modifier clarifying that it is done with the elbow pushing harder on each strokes. (One could even go further and e.g. describe a melodic contour using numbers in a free-form row which is ignored by the playback engine).

You can put any combination of sounds for the two hands in the same column, but only certain pairings are turned into combination tones. Otherwise the two sounds will just play simultaneously, regardless whether it is actually possible on the drum.

Stick tones and muffling

In the above example, p in the left hand row indicates that the palm is placed on the skin, and - that it remains there during subsequent pulses. Both muffle the skin and change the sound of the right hand stick strokes. (t is a gentle tap with the fingertips.)

Notations

• RL
• LR
• RL (internal) (not meant to be used for transcriptions)

LR has the left hand on top, so you would turn it counterclockwise and read it from bottom to top, which some people may prefer. You can translate pieces between both.

Click on the tabs below for a description of each notation: