Drum notation software

Excuse the extreme naivety here, but I've heard of a few of these software titles in my lifetime but never used them. Do any of them mentioned (or even not yet mentioned!) allow you to play your actual drums, for example, electronic drums over MIDI, and automatically score your playing?
 
Excuse the extreme naivety here, but I've heard of a few of these software titles in my lifetime but never used them. Do any of them mentioned (or even not yet mentioned!) allow you to play your actual drums, for example, electronic drums over MIDI, and automatically score your playing?

Sure, but in practice I don't think you'd want to do this. You'd have to play very tight to the metronome, and tell the software to quantize everything to, say 16ths. So, if everything you played was a quarter note, 8th, or 16th, you'd be good. But as soon as you played a triplet, or fell out of sync, or the software hiccuped, that part of the transcription would be messed up, and you'd have to manually go in a correct it.

By the time you adjusted the metronome and quantize settings, played the drums, and corrected all the errors, you probably wouldn't save any time. When entering drum music by hand, you learn to make good use of measure repeats, and copy/paste commands.

If you do try it, let us know how it goes!
 
Cool thanks guys.. someday.. when I have free time LOL. Sounds like I'll be better off hand-doing it.
 
I use Reflow, it's inexpensive, easy to use and syncs across my laptop, iPad and iPhone.

Two things I don't like about it is that it can't score drags, and, on playback, flams sound awful.

Does anyone know of any software that can score drags and play them, and flams, well on playback?
 
Hi all, I'm sorry that I'm late on this seemingly hot topic.
I was wondering if I developed and build a program that specifically produced drum notation from a recorded MIDI drum file, would you or drummers alike with ekits buy it? Just a feeler as a fellow drummer. We all know the pain of tediously composing durm scores note by for our students. And so I'm on a crusdae to help solve this old age problem of stealing our time back. Record, save or print or share.
Please let me know as I'd like to hear from you all.
 
Another vote for MuseScore. I used Sibelius for years and got MuseScore as a temporary fix when my laptop got stolen. I liked it so much I never went back to Sibelius.
Hey, Adam. Out of interest, I’m assuming with muscore that you’re still having to input notes manually?
 
Hey, Adam. Out of interest, I’m assuming with muscore that you’re still having to input notes manually?

Ah, sorry, just saw your post. You can open a MIDI file in MuseScore and it will notate it for you. Or if you have a MIDI device like a keyboard, or a ekit, you could play them in. The problem would be the mapping. It places the notes in uncommon spots for some weird reason, leaving it to resemble nothing like a proper drum score. You could remap everything, assigning each sound to a place on the staff. I bet it would be a pretty big pain in the ass, BUT you would only have to do it once.
 
Oh I’m talking about attempting to build a program that would notate what you’ve just recorded on an ekit but properly. No mapping required. As educator, I’ve longed for software like this. Pretty sure it does t exist to my knowledge. So I’m giving it a go. Do you think this would be helpful?
 
Hi all, I'm sorry that I'm late on this seemingly hot topic.
I was wondering if I developed and build a program that specifically produced drum notation from a recorded MIDI drum file, would you or drummers alike with ekits buy it? Just a feeler as a fellow drummer. We all know the pain of tediously composing durm scores note by for our students. And so I'm on a crusdae to help solve this old age problem of stealing our time back. Record, save or print or share.
Please let me know as I'd like to hear from you all.
I'd love something simple and affordable (for the Mac). I'm sure there are many options already, but what I tried so far (printing from Logic or Sibelius) comes with a steep learning curve (and price). What I also miss is midi maps for common drum kits (and save custom), and a way to customize the look (noteheads, line). In the end you can't eliminate mapping unless you congifure all the drum kits ever made in the world... but for the lesser common ones it could be easier to do midi learn asking one to hit each pad. The other issue is where someone records to (into this new app?), because drum vsts like SD3 etc. already remap the kit to their own thing. General Midi just doesn't have enough notes for drumming.
 
I'd love something simple and affordable (for the Mac). I'm sure there are many options already, but what I tried so far (printing from Logic or Sibelius) comes with a steep learning curve (and price). What I also miss is midi maps for common drum kits (and save custom), and a way to customize the look (noteheads, line). In the end you can't eliminate mapping unless you congifure all the drum kits ever made in the world... but for the lesser common ones it could be easier to do midi learn asking one to hit each pad. The other issue is where someone records to (into this new app?), because drum vsts like SD3 etc. already remap the kit to their own thing. General Midi just doesn't have enough notes for drumming.
I think I can take care of those issues. Great points to take back to lab.
 
Aered seems mostly fairly intuitive to use but has some potential flaws, depending what you want.

Here's the flaws (for me) that I spotted & I hope that they'll fix them soon:-
1) It doesn't resize the icons for the screen you're using so on a 4K monitor you need an electron microscope to see what thing to press.
2) It used hot-keys for somethings with no icon.
3) It seems that for a crash you have to have it on the same line as a hi-hat (but circled), I wanted to be able to show it how I want it not how someone else likes it.
4) It gets the bar counts wrong if you add a repeat section, (it crudely just numbers the bars as if the repeat doesn't happen).
5) Worst of all, for me, it lets you export a PDF after days of work. You go to print it out & there's an error in the PDF script so you can only view it on a computer. This might be just my set up.

Minor things; I'd like to be able to change the text style to help me delineate different things nearby, (e.g. lyrics, drummer notes, interpretation info etc.). I'd like it to have a full set of drumkit sound set up straight "out of the box" so I can listen to a score that I made without further faffing about.

Note; I am waiting for a solution to (5) above and I was pleased to get a response from Aered. I've answered their questions on this and mentioned the items above so here's hoping that they're planning an update. I'll let you know how it goes.
 
Last edited:
Oh I’m talking about attempting to build a program that would notate what you’ve just recorded on an ekit but properly. No mapping required. As educator, I’ve longed for software like this. Pretty sure it does t exist to my knowledge. So I’m giving it a go. Do you think this would be helpful?
Since musescore is open source, wouldn’t it be easier to design a plugin for it that maps midi drums? There is so much that goes into writing a music notation program. The basic need, it seems, is a plug-in. That way, people do not need to re-learn an entirely new program.

Jeff
 
Back
Top