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546 Chapter 16 Score Editor
Drum Notation with Mapped Score Styles
Nowadays, most MIDI instruments contain a variety of drum and percussion sounds.
Each MIDI note usually triggers a different sound. If a MIDI Region containing a drum
part is displayed with a regular Score Style, you see notes with no apparent relation
(except that these MIDI notes trigger the corresponding sounds) to the sounds
represented by them.
If you wish to notate these musically meaningless pitches as a readable drum part
which also uses special percussion note heads, then you will want to utilize Logic’s
Mapped Instruments and Mapped Score Styles.
The Basics of Drum Notation with Logic
For the purpose of drum notation, you need to use both a Mapped Instrument as a
Track Instrument, and a Mapped Score Style, for the notation to be displayed properly.
We’ll start with the Mapped Instrument.
Open an Environment window, and create a new Mapped Instrument (see “Mapped
Instrument” on page 219) and double-click its icon.
You will see the Drum Map Editor for the instrument. The default settings correspond to
the General MIDI drum note assignments, but they can be edited.
In the column to the far right, there are three parameters which are relevant for
notation:
Head
Determines the shape of the note head for notes triggered by this particular pitch. You
can choose the shape from the pull-down menu, which appears when you click and
hold on any of the note heads displayed here.
Group
Here, each MIDI note can be assigned to a Drum Group, using a pull-down menu. For
the most commonly used drum sounds, there are already some groups defined in this
menu (Kick, Snare, Hi hat, Toms, Cymbals, and so on). If you want to define a new Drum
Group for another instrument sound (for example Tambourine), select one of the New
Groups in the pull-down menu, and double-click on it. This opens an entry field, where
you can determine a name for the new Drum Group.
The Drum Groups play an essential role in “Mapped Score Styles”: a note has to be
assigned to a Drum Group to be displayed with a Mapped Score Style. If it’s not, it
won’t be visible.