Dear Developers Of Notation Programs: Drums Are NOT An Afterthought!

 

Over the past month I have been trying various notation programs to help with my lessons online as well as in person, and one thing I have found in common with all of these programs, is they all seem to treat drums as an afterthought, and many don’t even work at all. This has been incredibly frustrating and causing me much headache.

Programs I’ve tried:

1. Musescore – Works to some extent but note entry is horrible, correcting mistakes is nearly impossible without screwing up every other note you entered.
2. Crescendo – Interface is actually better than average, however drum score flat out is not possible. It does not display correctly at all.
3. Musnik – Absolutely terrible UI. Basically unusable.
4. Finale Notepad – Another god awful UI, hard to use, but basic drum notation is at least possible, though you’ll be ripping your hair out by the time you get something readable.
5. Rosegarden – Does not even provide a drum/percussion staff.

I will keep investigating this HUGE problem but at the time being there’s really not a single program I can recommend for drummers. I’ve heard Sibelius works, but haven’t tried it personally. The program as a whole has a reputation of having one of the worst UIs of all time.

At the time being Musescore seems to be the only one that actually works, but it’s literally 100x easier to just write the lessons out by hand than wrestle with this clunky and unintuitive interface.