The Drums Track contains the percussion events of the song.  By General Midi convention, this usually needs to be allocated to channel 09 to access the drum sounds.

Drum segments can hold events, or they can be marked as repeat or autostyle segments to have their content automatically generated.

Segment Sheet

The lines of drum segments are the drums in the drum kit, each with a text description.

Drum events of various types are placed on these lines to indicate when each drum beat should be played.  A drum event cannot span more than one line, but multiple events can be placed vertically to play simultaneously.

Staff Sheet

Songtrix does not generate staff notation for the Drums track.

The lack of standard notation for drum sounds makes it of limited value, and the high density of events commonly found in drum parts would impact negatively on the layout of the other tracks.

However, to allow synchronization between work sheets and staff sheets, the Drums track can still have the focus and be included in selections.  It appears underneath the Bass stave as a thin, empty region.

Drum Events

There are two different types of drum events, each is created by one of the tools available in drum segments.

• Drum Beat - a simple drum beat.

• Drum Roll - a series of short beats produced by one event.

Drums Setup

The Track Setup window for the Drums track contains the Controls and Drum Kit pages, which respectively adjust the controllers and the scope of the track (as a set of drums).