Copyright (C) 2011-19 Michael Thomas

DrumBurp is a simple GUI for creating and editing music notation for drum kit.

DrumBurp's aim is to make the user-experience of writing drum music as quick and intuitive as possible. The generality of many existing music notation software packages means that there is an abundance of unnecessary complexity involved in writing drum notation. While these packages can produce beautiful output, and cope with everything you could ever possibly want to notate, they can be slow and ponderous to use. By being very clear that the objective of DrumBurp is restricted to writing only drum music, I hope to remove the difficulties such generality can impose.

DrumBurp will never have a Bagpipes mode.

The fundamental philosophy of DrumBurp is as follows: when faced with a choice between additional functionality/complexity in a specific case, or speed, simplicity and intuitive user interaction in the general case, the general case always wins. Simple, quick and stupid is better than complex, slow and clever.

DrumBurp is focussed around using a simple representation of drum music. For each note you play it essentially cares about:

• WHICH drum you hit,
• WHEN you hit it,
• and HOW you strike it.

These three pieces of information together are sufficient to write drum music in tablature notation. DrumBurp aims to allow the drummer to get this information into the computer as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

DrumBurp stores this information in its own format in its saved score files. However, it can export tablature as ASCII text files easily enough. DrumBurp can also output "real" drum notation as aesthetically pleasing and easy to read as that produced by Lilypond or Nted.

DrumBurp's fundamental data structures should rarely, if ever, change. The most important part of DrumBurp is its interface with the user. Its goal for the user is less time writing, more time drumming.

DrumBurp is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

See the COPYING.txt file for more details of the GNU GPL.

Contact details: drumburp@whatang.org