I am trying to recreate what you see in the attached example, i.e. an implementation of the «Berger»/«Zündstoff» style drum notation used primarily in Swiss/Basel drumming.
It took me quite a while and a lot of fiddling (aka «egineering») to do this in Finale and I am currently testing Dorico to see if this is feasible.
Key features (in combination) - illustrated in the attached fragment:
single-line staff
note heads above the line indicate right hand, below left hand beats
all stems down and stem ends aligned below (i.e. notes above the line have longer stems than those below)
abbreviation for special rolls using small notes and numbers as well as “tremolos” on stems of full sized and small notes
accents and double accents (caret symbols) as well as use of Bravura note heads with «extensions» for «flams» and «tap-flams»
Any hints, tipps, suggestions, etc would be much appreciated.
Playback is not a priority at this point.
Hello Gérald, thank you for helping to push those requirements forward; at least for the Flam and Doublé there has been done fundamental work in SMuFL to make them available by default (see “Techniques noteheads”). Soon there will be a beautified version of those glyphs thank to the amazing support of Elaine Gould.
For the other feature requests I would refer to the Dorico Product Management and see if we can give as much assistance as required.
Did you ever manage to get this type of notation working properly in Dorico? I have been able to do this in Finale and Sibelius for many years - I’ve published drumming books with both but as of yet can’t believe how difficult this notation is to get working in Dorico. Blows my mind how this simple task is so difficult to achieve. I was sold Dorico on the idea it was much better than Sibelius, created by x-sibelius/avid employees…apparently this simple task is out of reach.
It’s been a while since I tried but I’ll give it another shot now and see. It was just so simple in Sibelius.
Best,
Doug S.
PS…..Here is an example (from Sibelius) of what I’m needing to do:
I have managed to get some satisfying (to me) results using note heads for flams and tap-flams, playing styles for left/right and playing techniques for numbered rolls.
Aligning stems and positioning of numbered rolls is done manually and takes up a lot of time. Spacing according to duration is awkward but important to at least some of my drumming friends.
I prefer this over Finale but think that native support for the more tedious manual interventions is unlikely. Some smart macros might help a lot however I also never got around to diving into LUA on Finale…
Hi there
I only had to make changes to my userlibrary.xml to have the “Swiss rudiments flam” and “Swiss rudiments doublé” available in the menu. As they are used regularly I have assigned them to keys on the keyboard. So, there was no need for me to work on alternative methods.
I have been wanting to write this (my approach to rudimental drum notation in Dorico) up properly (my notes to myself are not fit for sharing) and maybe even organize a workshop if there is enough interest. I have not enough time at the moment. I’ll make an effort and, please, remind me if you don’t hear from me before the end of February.
I would be curious to learn more about the interest (“other people”) in setting “Zündstoff/Swiss”/rudimental drum notation in Dorico.
However, looking at your interests in ancient music and probably special notation needs, you are almost certainly going to be better of, working with the Dorico people directly.
This is good stuff - thanks Jesper. I played around with it last night and figured out that I could start with a 5 line marching drum staff, input a few notes using the A and C keys (left and right hands), then change the staff type to a single line. The ability to input pitched notes as A and C on the keyboard remains (something that isn’t available when you pick just a single line staff to begin with). This seems like a simple change that Steinberg could make to a single line marching drum staff to avoid this workaround.
I’ll look at your example also and see if it would be easier to implement. Many thanks for sending.
