Hi everyone!
Is there a way to create drum lead sheets in the style of the Tommy Igoe drumbooks in Dorico? Specifically, I’m only interested in the second line in the attached example (“play 16” with the wide diagonal slash), the rest is no problem.
Thanks in advance for your input.
Best regards,
Patrick
This has been suggested by multiple users. It will be interesting to see what the Development Team will do in response, but with many suggestions and improvements on the Team’s to-do lists, it is impossible to say (at this point even for them, I expect) when it might happen.
At the moment, to the extent that your request is possible, it is a somewhat complicated work-around.
Thank you Derrek for your reply! That helped me a lot! At least I know that I am not the only one who would welcome a “multi-play” feature.
Meanwhile I could use the “multirest/multirepeat” feature from the layout/players section, that is very close. For my personal taste an adapted “multi-repeat” with just a different symbol in the bar (f.e. the diagonal stroke) and the words “play” + number of collapsed repeats would do the job.
Best regards,
Patrick
The absolut worst problem with this (existing) functionality, is that you can’t really control it yourself. If it is globally configured that this will happen, then Dorico will consolidate one-bar repeats automatically also in places where you don’t want this to happen. For me that makes the function useless, alternatively you can’t really use the one-bar-repeats which then are fairly useless. The “C” section in the thread start is an example: the writer wants these one-bar repeats as separate measures and not consolidated right there. Fully natural and looks good in this context. And is also necessary if there are dynamics or other instructions that the drummer should see along the way.
The quintessence is that “multimeasure play” regions are something that I as a writer decide to have in a specific area (or in multiple areas one by one). Also a conclusion is that “do not use one-bar repeats for this purpose”. A new type of “repeat” mark is needed here. And please make it possible to configure how it should look and what text to display.
Anyway great to get some help in my tries to convince the Dorico product mgmt that this is perhaps one of the greatest time savers that could be added. The “workaround” method to produce “Play X” regions makes the drum part writing unacceptably tedious and take hours.
Hi Patrick,
I noticed a slight difference in how I notate the “Line” in Tommy Igoe’s chart compared to your example. Typically, I employ two methods:
So the Line in your first example seams to be a bit uncommon to me an I tend to use multirepeats or slashaes, because these signs are musically more clear to me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to provide an example at the moment, but I hope my explanation clarifies my approach. I may be able to create an example later this evening if needed. Kind regards
Just my 2 cents.
What’s great about the Tommy Igoe lead sheet is that it gives you everything you need as a drummer with minimal information.
As a drummer, what I don’t like is parts where the one bar repeat is used with 1 bar of the rhythm and then an odd number with one bar repeats. You are playing and then you are forced to do math. Simple math, but still. You already know what rhythm to play. You play in a style. In the Tommy Igoe lead sheet you simply get 8, 16, 24 or 32 bars. That distance is in your system as a drummer, you don’t think, but you can play nicely.
If you are not a drummer, remember that quite often a drummer does not look at his music because there are so many repetitions. Then it should be easy to quickly see where you are again.
Now when I make a chart for myself I use consolidated rests and add the word play. I wouldn’t dare give that to someone else because it is incorrect notation. But it does work.
I understand if it is quite complicated to add this notation to Dorico, but if it ever becomes possible in the future I will welcome it.
Thanks guys! I totally agree with your arguments. Different cases need different approaches.
I am using Dorico for all my drum transcriptions and percussion-ensemble arrangements and never had any major complaints. Most of my arrangements are for young students, so there is no need for “play x” repeats. This time I am writing leadsheets for myself and I want it as compact as possible. This seems to be a bit tricky without a lot of manual editing.
I uploaded two examples: “Pop-Song” (my usual approach for students, totally fine for me) and “Reggae-Song” (ugly and a waste of paper, but I could write it fast) - just to demonstrate that in the second case a “Tommy Igoe Style” leadsheet would look so much better and is better readable.
Best regards,
Patrick
Pop-Song - Drum Set.pdf (41,0 KB)
Reggae-Song - Drum Set.pdf (43,7 KB)
Here is an exemple that would have been many pages if I not spent the time doing the “Play X” exercises repeatedly for some hours. I got it down to 3, which is OK.
Cochise_v1.1b_Dr.pdf (168.6 KB)
Still not extremely happy with it, but it is obviously readable at least, we are rehearsing the music now.
As a non-drummer I am finding this discussion with examples very informative. Perhaps Dorico could make a youtube video using this or similar material. There is a lot of confusion related to drum notation for the very simple reason that notating drums is young compared to notating other instruments. And music theory professors are essentially never drummers so can’t answer questions.
Wow, that’s a perfect example for the need of such a feature. You did a great job with this arrangement.
I completely agree that there should be support for this in Dorico. There seem to be two major impediments currently:
There really isn’t any way to accomplish this and have both score and parts looking correct. Without seeing his file, I’m assuming @dan.h.tillberg had to use 1-bar repeats or rests starting in bar 129 so they would consolidate. This makes the score incorrect as below:
It’s also very standard to use 1-bar repeats in drum set writing as slashes contribute a lot of visual clutter that the drummer doesn’t need to see. Layout Options / Players / Consolidate: Multi-bar Fests and Bar Repeats is an all-or-nothing setting for the entire layout. Here’s page 35 of Norman Weinberg’s book Standardized Drumset Notation:
… and the SECTION/ENSEMBLE FIGURE description on page 39:
… and pg 97 from the Ken Williams book:
… and the Drum part to Thad’s Big Dipper, probably one of the most played arrangements by high school and college bands in the USA.
My point with all that is that it’s entirely possible some 1-bar repeats should consolidate in this case and some not. 1-bar repeats really aren’t a satisfactory tool for this.
It could be nice if Dorico could offer some sort of Consolidation Region. Once applied a Consolidation Region could automatically consolidate in layouts with Consolidation selected. Ideally the user could specify the text and placement. In the score the user could select whether an initial bar of slashes, wavy lines, or whatever is used, and then if 1-bar repeats or another method such as a line should be used.
The current conflicts between parts and score really means that there isn’t a satisfactory solution for this type of notation other than adding an additional player, so one player looks correct in the score and the other looks correct in the part. It would be nice to have a better solution for this.
Hi again @FredGUnn , as you know I agree with most of what you say. Let’s not mess up the usage of one-bar repeats, they are fine without any consolidation. And let me as a writer decide what regions should be consolidated and which should not.
I think it could be just as simple as for applying slash regions or bar repeat regions or chord symbol regions: just mark what measures you want to be consolidated, select a command and bam! In the corresponding part, my configured way of showing this is now displayed, and in the score this region is marked so that it is easy to see that these measures are consolidated (and therefore not individually visible) in the part.
And, oh, all my “Play X” regions in the part I sent were originally multimeasure rests that have been manipulated :-/
What also is a quit fast way of workflow is that everytime you want Play 8 or something like that, you just do nothing. In the part you get consolidated rests and you leave it like that. When you print you print to SVG. In an svg editor (Affinity designer I use) you can remove the rests and add the play 8.
See example.
03 - The Way That You Borrow - Drums2.pdf (148.2 KB)
It’s simple enough to just delete the rest in Acrobat too. As I’m always exporting PDFs anyway, it’s only one additional step.
It still doesn’t solve the problem that I now have rests in the score though. I guess I could position the “Play 8” in the first bar, then delete each individual bar rest that follows in the PDF. It sure would be nice if there was a mechanism to handle this where both part and score could be correct though, without external editing or duplicating the player.
That’s true, but I only have Acrobat reader. Acrobat is quite expensive. Affinity is not expensive.
I always make another part for playback anyway.
I agree 100%
Could you add these as a Page Override with multiple image boxes on the player Part? If you had a prepared graphic with all the necessary “Play x” texts. It would be fiddly but I wonder if it would work, at least as long as the Part doesn’t change due to some other edit, in which case the locations of all the image boxes would probably have to be adjusted.
Thanks @Maarten_Kruijswijk !
Your advice using Affinity Designer for deleting multi-repeats and replacing it with a custom “play” box was great! - btw. it’s on sale right now -
For my simple “Reggae-Song” leadsheet this method worked well.
03 - Drum Set - REGGAE-SONG - 001.pdf (121,5 KB)
@Romanos , or others familiar with this suite of programs:
Since you have often spoken about Affinity, which is now on sale, can you say which of their programs you find most useful?
You can use any svg-editor, there are even some free ones like Inkscape, but I didn’t like the UI, so I went with Affinity Designer, which is the right tool from their lineup. There is a “spring-sale” (-30%) on all of their products.
@fizzler this reggae song part is very clear if you compare it with the first one. You see the form of the song on 1 page. So when you read from iPad it is super easy to read.
