Drumline music composition

[Zsnare]

hey guys i'm wondering what kind of programs or software or in other words a computer thing that i can write drumline music? ive heard of virtual drumline, is that something i should consider buying? i'm writing the show music for my line this year and i'm wondering what program to get. any advice would be awesome

[Church Drummer]

I use a program called Encore that will do what you want quite nicely, but it isn't cheap, I believe it's about $300.00 now. You can have as many score staffs as you could possibly want, assign different drums sounds to different notes on the clefs (so you can hear the parts your writing), does all the standard drum notation markings, etc. There may be cheaper alternatives that will work just as well.

[fiacovaz]

That's incredible!! And to think that I had to write all the drum cadences and percussion features I wrote 30 some years ago by hand. As for listening to them, it was all inside my head. I would think that school band programs today would have this kind of technology available for their students.

[Fades Away]

Yeah encore is a great program in fact, my band teacher in High school and bought an expansion (I beilieve it was for Encore) That allowed you to mic the snare and it would notate what you were playing, the only issue i had noticed was that with some drum rolls and rudiments, they were notated incorrectly but it was an easy fix whenever that happened, also if you were the least bit off tempo, it would notate it that way ha ha i was so confused at first, but again, it was an easy fix. I actually wrote my highschool's cadence my senior year, it was a blast to see it all come together.

[Church Drummer]

That allowed you to mic the snare and it would notate what you were playing, the only issue i had noticed was that with some drum rolls and rudiments, they were notated incorrectly but it was an easy fix whenever that happened, also if you were the least bit off tempo, it would notate it that way ha ha i was so confused at first, but again, it was an easy fix.

I'm not sure if Encore will notate audio input directly (but I've got an older version too), but it will take input from any midi-device, so you could use electronic drums, or an acoustic drum with a trigger run to a midi-device. The program will make the occasional transcription error, or not notate things exactly like you wanted them, but as you said it's pretty easy to edit. Obviously any deviation you make from the click track will show up, on the music, there is a way to adjust some of that. If you know the smallest value note you are going to be playing is an 1/8 or 1/16 note you can tell it to sort of round your input to the nearest 1/8 or 1/16. Personally when I do drum parts on it, I normally just drag and drop the notes I want onto the staff. If there is any repitition in the parts you can cut and paste measures or sections, so you only have to manually input a figure once by hand.

[Fades Away]

Now that i think of it, maybe it was a trigger! Dang no that's going to bug me, also thats a really good tip as far as changing the sensativity goes!

[jazzkat]

sibalius and virtual drumline.