![]() ![]() MuseScore looked great but the editing workflow just frustrated me, trying to get multiple voices in one stave (required when you have to chart up to 4 notes at a time in one place, because drummers have 4 limbs )) was far too fiddly and resulted in many annoying round-trips. Finale Notepad was almost the tool I needed, except that it refuses to properly annotate open/closed hi hats which makes it completely useless in practice (in the full Finale you can customise the notation to do it, but why do you have to?). In the end I found Lilypond, and it’s wonderful. Not only does it support the full set of drum notation, it’s also based on text markup, making it a lot like LaTeX, which as a programmer is just perfect. Everything can be expressed as a nested syntax, copy & pasted easily, wrapped in repeats and context-specific tweaks when you need them, and I can version the whole thing in a git repository when I refine my tracks. However, I did find that the default notation that Lilypond uses for drums was different to what I was used to. There’s no one standard notation, but the one I always use (and encounter most in places like Online Drummer and Rhythm magazine) is as denoted here. Conversely Lilypond seems to default to what Wikipedia says, which is just a weird version (to me). So the first thing I did was customise that - luckily being programmer-friendly Lilypond lets you alter most things using include files, which I used to shift the notation the way I wanted. Here’s my current standard include file, which in addition to making the notation ‘standard’ as per my experience, but also defines a useful macro ‘\flam’ which lets you create flams really quickly. I could talk about all the cool things it supports really easily, like repeat segments with alternate endings, vocal part overlays, smart auto-layout and more. But instead, I thought I’d just share what I created today in just a few hours despite only finding Lilypond yesterday. I’ve created a public git repository with my first attempt at a full song score (pull requests welcome if you think you can improve it :)), which is Tick Tick Boom by The Hives. In the next lesson, we’ll talk about the placement of rests in “Stems Up” single voice transcriptions.I want to play this but I couldn’t find a proper score for it, and I like to read a score when I’m practicing. When run through the LilyPond interpreter, this should result in the following: ![]() To engrave the single voice “stems up” version (which is becoming more and more popular in modern transcriptions), all we do is add the bass drum part to the \up voice and remove it from the \down voice. If you’ve done everything correctly, here is what you should get as a result. Either version of the \score section is acceptable. The LilyPond interpreter ignores the extra white space. Note that the \score section is spaced differently than it was in the template above. In the first example, we’ll sepearte the hands and feet into different voices. Using these, we’ll put together “Rock Groove #1” in a couple of different ways. Here are the ones you’ll be using most often. Instead of traditional note names, though, we’ll use the drum names instead. Here is a simple drum template \version "2.18.0" However, when adding the voices, you must use DrumVoice instead of Voice to signify that the notes contained will be drum notes and not traditional pitches. This lesson should provide a starting point for engraving drum music in LilyPond.Ī simple template for creating music for drums is much the same as creating a two voice part on a single staff. As you look at the examples provided in this lesson, keep in mind that things like uneven beams will be corrected in subsequent lessons. In this first part, we are going to look at working strictly with LilyPond’s default behavior. In this series I am going to walk through the process of learning how to transcribe for drums step-by-step. Learning to transcribe pieces for drums can be downright daunting. Learning to transcribe in LilyPond can be challenging.
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