Preparing a Drum Part

If you are preparing a drum part, here are several tips that you should find useful.

If a drum part shows different pitches and accidentals for different drum instruments, like this...

and you want the rearrange the drum part so that each drum instrument has its own separate staff line, like this:

     Follow the instructions for Splitting Drum Track Into Individual Drum Staves.

To merge multiple single-line drum parts back into a combined drum part:

     Apply the Merge Tracks command to the multiple single-line drum tracks.

To change the notehead shape for a single-line drum instrument to an , , , , or :

     Click the Instrument Sound Selection track control.

Composer will display the Track Setup dialog box.

     In the bottom, left corner of the Track Setup dialog box, turn off the checkmark for Notehead Style / Use Default.

     In the selection box next to the Notehead Style / Use Default option, choose the notehead shape.

To change the notehead shape for individual notes:

     Follow the instructions in Editing Notehead Shapes.

To change the volume levels and pan of drum instruments throughout the song:

     If your MIDI playback device is a General MIDI (GM) device, then it will require that all of the drum kit tracks be assigned to channel 10. If you use the Split Drum Tracks command, the resulting individual drum instrument tracks will each be assigned to the same channel 10, You should choose just one of the individual drum instrument tracks to serve as a master track for graphically editing volume levels and pan levels throughout the song for the drum instruments. You will not be able to independently control the MIDI volume levels and pan levels for the individual drum instruments assigned to General MIDI channel 10. However, you can still change the loudness of each individual note. This way, you can still edit independent volume levels for each drum instrument. However, you will not be able to set independent pan levels for each drum instrument.

     If you MIDI playback device is not General MIDI, and its drum kit allows you to use multiple MIDI channels, then assign the different drum instruments to different MIDI channels if you want independent volume and pan graphs for the different drum instruments.

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