Drum Score Editor

Drum Score Editor is free software for drum scores in the pipe band world. Runs on macOS, Windows and Linux - happy scoring!

Download Drum Score Editor

Microsoft Windows

Download & Installation for Windows

N.B. Tested on Windows 8 and 10
Click on the button below to download the installer
Run the downloaded installer, when Windows prompts check that the installer is signed by Alan White - this is a security check to make sure you don't install viruses that nutters attach to genuine software
Once installed Drum Score Editor will open
Optional: Feel free to tidy up and delete the installer from your downloads folder

Windows Download

Apple macOS

Download & Installation for macOS

N.B. Tested on macOS 9 & 10
Click on the button below to download the installer
The downloaded disk image will open
As per usual for macOS software installs, drag the Drum Score Editor icon on to the Applications icon
Optional: Feel free to tidy up and delete the installer from your downloads folder

About Drum Score Editor

Drum Score Editor is free software for drum scores in the pipe band world and is available on Apple macOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux. There is no charge to download and use the community edition of this software, it's distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

There is a paid license available which unlocks advanced features that will save even more time writing and maintaining scores for a drum corps. More details about this are available in the Licensing section below, however the free version is very capable and many people regard this still as the most rapid way to work with drum scores.

Importantly Drum Score Editor is actively maintained and updated, with new features and any bugfixes forthcoming as needed, with an active community of users supporting

It's Still Free

There's a whole bunch of legal stuff as per the license above, but really this is just to say it's free and no-one is allowed to sell you it, nor can you sell it on. You can't use it to make money either unless we agree that in advance as you'll probably want better support than the best efforts there is with this, given it's free!

Support, Questions

If something's not working how it should, or just isn't clear to you, am happy to help anyone out, either via facebook or at alan@whiteware.org - any suggestions for improvement always welcome!

Links

Drum Score Editor Licenses

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Community & Studio Editions

The Community Edition of Drum Score Editor is free to download and free to use, there are no charges or fees of any sort. Please feel free to buy me a beer any time we're in the same beer tent though ;)

The Studio Edition costs £25 and adds features to help make an author edit scores more quickly and is enabled through adding a license key to the Community Edition. These license keys can be purchased through this website or getting in touch with alan@whiteware.org.

Important Drum Score Editor is not a profit making venture, sale of licenses helps cover costs of hosting this website and other items needed to produce and distribute software safely.

Community Edition Features

What you see is what you get, it prints what you see on the screen
Select and action interface, i.e. select some notes and choose an action, e.g. make them an irregular group, or add embellishments etc
Generate a new blank score based on tune type (march, strathspey) and time signature
Fully flexible placement and size of text areas and music areas on the page, customise as you need, even multiple scores on one page
Apply different point sizes to text and music to scale to fit as needed
Fast editing through keystroke actions, no need to keep reaching for the mouse once up to speed on these
Handles irregular groups and rests
Crescendo and diminuendo
Rolls, stroke rolls, across staff lines, roll to nowhere for end of score situations
Unison as either a bracket above the notes or a highlighter pen or both, option to include any embellishment in the unison, or just the tap in a roll
Option for note heads as strokes instead of ellipses
Different colour highlighter pens for those who use colour to show light and shade
When entering notes, cursor smart spaces to where the next note should be in regular groups
Open file format, humans can read it if they’re interested in importing Drum Score files into other software (one day I’ll make it MusicXML compliant)
Integrated with the desktop, click on files to load in Drum Score Editor, easy access to recently used files from the File menu
Supports the EUSPBA standard tenor symbols

Studio Edition Features

Rudiment Libraries - often used phrases and rudiments can be dragged and dropped onto any number of libraries, which can be organised as you like, e.g. a 2/4 library, a strathspey phrase library
Bar content guidance, warns you if there too few or too many notes in a bar
Automatic joining of tails of notes (beaming), includes ensuring only a single line used on primary subdivisions within a beat
Export as JPEG, PDF, PNG or SVG file for onwards uses as graphic images, e.g. embed in a document
Clone whole staff line - it’s a workflow that automates copying a staff line and it’s contents and inserts it. All possible without the workflow, but just more keystrokes
1st and 2nd time workflow - these will take the last line of a part and duplicate it and sort out the unison and bar markers and add some text to show which line is which time. Note that for single bars or groups of notes you want to mark as 1st and 2nd time it doesn’t do anything clever yet - in some ways it clutters a score doing that and with software it’s easy enough to add whole new lines and or parts - seen many scores where folks have tried to mark up changes and only 2 bars in the part were the same! Far better to use no repeats in that case imho
New score preferences are saved between launches of the software so if you always want your new scores generated with pink highlight for unison, this will remember
Workspace preferences are saved, window size etc
Block selection - without this you can select runs of notes, but if you wanted to say select bars 3 and 4 and 7 and 8 of a 2/4 which has 4 bars per line because you want to copy and paste the middles and endings, this is your friend
Vertically align notes - you can do this by hand without this tool, but this is so much easier
Squeeze / expand runs of notes - you’ve entered your masterful selection of singles and decided you need more space on the page or indeed that you have space to spread them out more - this will proportionately allow you to spread them out or push them closer together
Beautify your score - very experimental, in it’s first rendition but can produce some good results, you basically ask it to go place the notes where they “should be” in each bar. Sometimes the logical placing isn’t pretty, e.g. dot and cut, so some opinions have been embedded in the code! You could spend a lifetime tweaking this or even write a thesis on it