Drum kit tuition book creation

Dorico
1

Hello,

A project I hope to finally get done in 2025 is creating my own drum kit tuition book(s) for beginners to advanced. For this, I have a couple of questions about the software:

  1. is it possible to plug my electic kit into my pc and play to produce written notation?
  2. is there a function by which I can convert PDFs into reworkable notation projects? years ago I made a bunch of worksheets using another music notation software but long ago lost the actual files and now only have printable PDFs but would like to be able to integrate them into a larger project and have it all have a uniform look throughout the book.

Thanks in advance.

Oscar

2

Welcome to the forum, @oscarthedrummer1!

Yes, it’s absolutely possible. You’ll need to fiddle around with assigning MIDI notes to instruments etc but it should be fine.

3

@DanielMuzMurray thanks! I shall give it a crack!

4

Although there are applications that can convert graphical files like PDFs into e.g. MusicXML files that can be imported into Dorico, doing this reliably with percussion music is tricky. You can read a recent round-up of several such applications here:

However, my recommendation would be to input the music again from scratch. This will both help you to gain facility with Dorico, and also ensure that you don’t have to proof-read all of the scanned/converted material with great care.

5

@dspreadbury thanks for the advice - that makes good sense :+1:

6

When you mention PDFs, do you mean actual PDFs created by the export function (or even “print to PDF”) of the original program they were created in? (Sibelius, Finale, Encore…?)

There exist applications such as PDFtoMusic Pro which can make sense of such “original” PDFs (which have encoded the musical content as characters, rather than scanned images an OCR/OMR application would need to decipher), and which may reduce the time needed to input such material considerably. (In my experience, the time taken to proofread and make minor edits is much less than inputting material from scratch, since it needs “realtime proofing” anyway; and this is compounded with the sheer amount of material to process.)

7

Good question! It’s been so long that I actually don’t remember whether I saved it as a PDF directly from the software or printed it out, scanned it, and saved it that way…

8

You should be able to determine it by opening the PDF in any standard PDF reader such as Apple Preview. If you’re able to click+drag / “paint select” over e.g. text strings on the PDF separately, then it’s likely an export from the software. If not, it’s a scanned rasterized image. (Other giveaways of image scans are slight tilts of the staff lines etc. as the paper might have not been 100% aligned with the scanner, etc.)