J
JasKinasis
Guest
This post is for any fellow drummers here on Linux.org.
A few years ago my band (Kinasis) were writing some new music and I quickly found a need to tab out some of my new drum parts. But there appeared to be a distinct lack of decent tab editors available for Linux. There are a few solutions out there, but they are all general music notation editors, aimed at writing music for other instruments. I also found that those that did support drum notation were quite complicated and time-consuming to get set up correctly for drums.
After a bit of duckduckgo-fu I found this website:
http://whatang.org/
It's for a piece of free-software called Drumburp - a fully featured FLOSS drum tab editor licensed under the GPL V3 and written in Python using pyQT.
Drumburp is a really powerful, yet easy to use tab editor which can export tabs in ASCII format, .pdf, or as MIDI files. You can also export to lilypond .ly format, which allows you use Lilypond to convert the exported .ly file into proper sheet music in .pdf format (extremely impressive!). You can also customise your kit in drumburp to match your physical setup and assign different notation symbols and midi notes/sounds to different parts of the kit. There are also dynamics in there (different hit velocities - accents, ghost notes etc). It's a really powerful little program and extremely easy to use. I highly recommend it to any drummers out there who are looking for a capable, dedicated, drum-tab editor (on Linux, Windows or Mac!)
I've been using Drumburp since one of the early versions. I was so impressed with the software that, aside from donating some cash; I have also helped Drumburp developer Mike (AKA Whatang) with some testing and debugging of Drumburp from time to time. There hasn't been a huge amount of activity since the last release of Drumburp in 2012, but Mike continues to develop Drumburp in his spare time, as and when he can. I wish I could do more to help develop Drumburp, but my schedule over the last couple of years has been way too hectic to for me to be of much use.
If there are any Python devs out there reading this, I'm sure that Mike would be appreciative of any help he could get. The source-code for Drumburp is hosted on Github, so you can fork it and send Mike a pull-request for any patches that you come up with!
In the past Mike has also asked for help WRT packaging Drumburp for various Linux distros. At the moment, the only way to install the program on Linux is to install from source. IMHO, Drumburp deserves to be included in the repos of your favourite distro, it is a great piece of software! But not having any packages available is a hurdle that has to be overcome before this can happen. If anybody with any packaging expertise has some spare time to help; again, I'm sure Mike would appreciate it!
Anyway, Drumburp - highly recommended. Check it out! (See link in the top of this post!)
A few years ago my band (Kinasis) were writing some new music and I quickly found a need to tab out some of my new drum parts. But there appeared to be a distinct lack of decent tab editors available for Linux. There are a few solutions out there, but they are all general music notation editors, aimed at writing music for other instruments. I also found that those that did support drum notation were quite complicated and time-consuming to get set up correctly for drums.
After a bit of duckduckgo-fu I found this website:
http://whatang.org/
It's for a piece of free-software called Drumburp - a fully featured FLOSS drum tab editor licensed under the GPL V3 and written in Python using pyQT.
Drumburp is a really powerful, yet easy to use tab editor which can export tabs in ASCII format, .pdf, or as MIDI files. You can also export to lilypond .ly format, which allows you use Lilypond to convert the exported .ly file into proper sheet music in .pdf format (extremely impressive!). You can also customise your kit in drumburp to match your physical setup and assign different notation symbols and midi notes/sounds to different parts of the kit. There are also dynamics in there (different hit velocities - accents, ghost notes etc). It's a really powerful little program and extremely easy to use. I highly recommend it to any drummers out there who are looking for a capable, dedicated, drum-tab editor (on Linux, Windows or Mac!)
I've been using Drumburp since one of the early versions. I was so impressed with the software that, aside from donating some cash; I have also helped Drumburp developer Mike (AKA Whatang) with some testing and debugging of Drumburp from time to time. There hasn't been a huge amount of activity since the last release of Drumburp in 2012, but Mike continues to develop Drumburp in his spare time, as and when he can. I wish I could do more to help develop Drumburp, but my schedule over the last couple of years has been way too hectic to for me to be of much use.
If there are any Python devs out there reading this, I'm sure that Mike would be appreciative of any help he could get. The source-code for Drumburp is hosted on Github, so you can fork it and send Mike a pull-request for any patches that you come up with!
In the past Mike has also asked for help WRT packaging Drumburp for various Linux distros. At the moment, the only way to install the program on Linux is to install from source. IMHO, Drumburp deserves to be included in the repos of your favourite distro, it is a great piece of software! But not having any packages available is a hurdle that has to be overcome before this can happen. If anybody with any packaging expertise has some spare time to help; again, I'm sure Mike would appreciate it!
Anyway, Drumburp - highly recommended. Check it out! (See link in the top of this post!)
