Drum notation
Hello,
as an drummer using exclusively musescore for my drumming blog (http://blog-batteur-debutant.fr) to write my drum scores, and I also made some educational videos about how to use the drum notation from MuseScore (http://youtu.be/UgSE4ragKWU, and http://youtu.be/Zo6AAuVDNmU)
I would like to make some suggestions for improvements.
Even though there are no standardised drum notation, the only one which comes the closest from it is the initiative of Norman Weinberg http://www.percussiontoday.com/filer/notation.pdf
He wrote a book about it : http://www.amazon.fr/Standardized-Drumset-Notation-Norman-Weinberg/dp/0…
With having let's say the 3-5 most used cymbals (crash, ride,splash, china), hi-hat (open, semi-open, closed), 5 toms, snare stokes (normal, x-stick, rimshot), up to 5 tom-toms, and 2 bass drum, I think it will suit to 95% of every drummer's need.
The English ghost note notation (with parenthesis) would also be a great asset.
But the ultimate killer feature for me, would be to be able to define my own keyboard short cuts, not being restricted to the 6 available. Because 6 keyboard shortcuts are easily reached while writing drum score.
Ideally, one could think about having a panel to define "custom keyboard shortcuts" with key combination, and associates these shortcuts with advances head notation, such as for instance chocked cymbals, or flam notation, xstick stoke on the tom-toms ...
Comments
You can define your own shortcuts:-
See this handbook page: http://musescore.org/en/handbook/drum-notation
In reply to You can define your own by ChurchOrganist
Yes, you can define your own - but only 7 of them, with only a specified set of short cut identifiers (A - G), and only for notes definable for the drum set. What if I want more than 7 shortcuts? What if I want to specify a shortcut for ghost notes (a pair of parenthesis surrounding a note) or an open hi-hat (a circle above the note)? Such things are tedious; enter the note, attach each special symbol, then move the symbol to the desired place. Talk about where a 'shortcut' could really save some time and effort...
In reply to Defining your own by drumcat
Agreed more drum shortcuts would be useful, but things like articulations aren't drum-specific. Shortcuts for articulations should apply to anything. Not sure what you mean about moving the symbol to the desired place, though. Most should automatically attach where they belong. With note selected, double click the palette symbol, and it should appear correctly automatically in most cases. So perhaps you are doing something incorrectly to make it seem more tedious than need be?
In reply to Agreed more drum shortcuts by Marc Sabatella
Yes, standard articulations from the palette mostly go where they are supposed to. Any other symbol, tends not to go where I want it. For instance, putting ( ) around a ghost note. The ( actually goes where it is supposed to, which is not the norm. The ) goes right next to it (would probably go in the same place if the left one was not already there), so has to be manually moved. Putting a circle over the hi-hat to indicate open - has to be moved. Putting an accent (>) on a note - has to be moved. Since the symbols seem to always go to the same place, if the movement could be recorded as part of the short cut, that would be awesome.
By the way, you CAN define your own symbols, but when you put them in a score, they don't come back the same size as when generated. It would be nice if resizing could be recorded into shortcuts as well.