Drum Notation in Logic Pro X

by Austin Burcham

This is a guide to achieve what I consider to be the

closest thing to the Holy Grail of drum notation. It
takes some work, but once you have Logic set up to
notate drums, you have the creative freedom to just
program drums in the Piano Roll and the drum
notation takes care of itself
Special thanks to Samuel Morse whoever and
wherever you are. I only figured this out because of
the original guide he created for Logic 8 found here
http://samuelmorse.info/files/drum_set_logic.pdf
This is just an expanded update for Logic Pro X.
Lets get to it

Open Logic and create a New Empty Project. Create 2 software instrument tracks from the pop
up dialog box.

Open the Environment. Go to Window -> Open Midi Environment or press 0

In the environment window that opens, go to New -> Mapped Instrument

You will see a little picture of a drum set with (Mapped Instr.) under it on the right side. Close the
window that pops up as well as the Environment window.

Go back to the Arrange window and right click on the first instrument track. Go to Reassign
Track -> Mixer -> (Mapped Instr.)

Rename the track to Drums

On the second track, rename it as "Playback and give it a drum sound by opening the library
and selecting Drum Kit -> Bluebird (or whichever drum set you like)

Next, we need to change the staff style on both tracks to #Drums, so click on the first track and
in the Inspector, click on Staff Style and set it to #Drums. Do the same for the second track.

Next, we are going to cable the mapped instrument to the Playback track so we can hear the
drum sounds. Open the Environment again with 0. Click on the small white triangle on the
Drums Mapped Instrument and drag it to the Playback track and let go.

Click Remove when prompted to from the popup and close the Environment.

Go back to the Arrange window and press the T key on your keyboard and then the number
2. This selects the Pencil tool.

Now click in the first bar of the Drums track to create a new region. A green region should
appear on the track. Click T twice to go back to the pointer tool.

Double click on the green region to open the Piano Roll. Press T and 2 again to select the
Pencil tool and draw a midi note on the C1 line. You should hear a kick drum sound.

Now, draw a note on each line of the Piano Roll that has a drum sound you want to use in your
notation. I use C1, C#1, D1, E1, F1, A1, C2, G#1, F#1, A#1, D#2, F2, C#2, and A2

Click on Score to open the Score Editor and you should see all of your drums notated out but
not quite how it should be

Open the Environment again with 0 and double click on the Drums mapped instrument. You
will see a popup window with all the notes from the piano roll in a list with names. Move it to
where you can see the Score and expand the window down.

Scroll down to the drums section and find KICK 1. Click and hold inside the box under the Rel.
Pos. column on that row and drag up until you see .5 (Logic gets a little buggy here so in order
to see the notes change lines in the Score Editor, you have click to click on Piano Roll and then
go back to the Score Editor to see the changes!)

Now change the rest of the drums to the following:

Sidestick: .5
SD 1: .5
SD 2: .5
Low Tom 2: 2.5
Closed HH: .5
Ped HH: .5
Mid Tom 2: 2
Open HH: .5
High Tom 2: 0
Ride 1: 1
Ride Bell: 1

The settings should look like this

Now, when you click on Piano Roll and then Score again, most of the notes should be on the
right lines. But, there are some things that still need tweaked

First, let's change the note heads. You can make these whatever you want but this is what I do.
Change the Sidestick to a x" by clicking in the Head column

Change SD1 to the note head at the bottom that has a circle around it. I like this for ghost
notes...

Change the Ride Bell to the diamond...

Change Crash 1 and Crash 2 to the standard "x"...

Also, change the Group on the Ped HH to Kick instead of HiHat. This will make the Ped HH
stems go down in the notation...

Now, click on Piano Roll and go back to Score and your notes should be on the correct lines
with the correct note heads! Still with me? Ok, carrying on

Now we need to change the Staff Styles so in the Score Editor, go to Layout -> Show Staff
Styles

We want the snare drum stems to go up instead of down so what we have to do is click on the
snare under the Assign section until it is highlighted blue then hit delete to delete it.

Click in the HiHat area under Drum Group until it is highlighted blue, then click the + button
above it where it says Assign

You should see a new voice get added to the top of the window that is labeled in the Kick
Group. Change that to Snare from Kick.

Now, under Position in the Snare voice we created, click and drag down until it is -2. The snare
drum notes should change in the Score Editor to be on the correct line.

At this point, the score will look really messed up so what you have to do is click and hold in the
Percussion Clef symbol on the left side and select Drum.5 to get the correct number of stave
lines back.

Now, go to Stem in the first row and set that to Up, and set the stem on the bottom row to Down.

Next, change the Rest setting on the bottom row to Hide instead of Show.

The kick and pedal hi hat stems should be going down while the snares, toms, and cymbals are
going up! This gives you your traditional two voice drum notation!

Go to the Piano Roll and program some basic beats using all of the drum set to see if the
notation output is correct. It should look something like this

You could stop here if you are happy with the look of that notation which is fairly academic, but I
like to tweak one last thing to make it easier to read and look cleaner. I like to have the kick
stems going up while leaving the pedal hihat stems going down. I find this easier to see where
the kicks line up with the hands and it cuts out a lot of the rests in the bar line that my brain
doesnt really need to process. So, to do that, go back into the Environment with 0 and double
click on the Drums Mapped Instrument again. On KICK 1, change the Group to Snare instead of
Kick. Change the Rel. Pos. to 1.5. That should be it. Click Piano Roll then Score again and
now the pedal hi-hat should be the only stem going down and everything else should be going
up.It should look like this when finished Nice and clean!

and a little more advanced programming will look like this

FURTHER CUSTOMIZATIONS
There is a lot of customization you can do to the look of the score in Logic. Go to Layout ->
Global Format. Experiment with these settings, particularly the Constant Spacing and
Proportional Spacing as they change how close or spread out the notes are in the score.

Under Numbers and Names, I prefer to have the Bar Numbers off but that is just a personal
preference. It depends on what you are creating this score for.

Under Layout, experiment with all these different spacings to see how they affect your score.
You really have a lot of flexibility when it comes to how everything is spaced and the thickness
of lines, stems, staves, etc Customize til your hearts content.

Once you have everything setup to your liking, I suggest saving this project as a template so
whenever you need to notate drum parts, you can just open Logic, select this template, and
youll be ready to program drums with a beautiful drum notation already done for you. To do
that, go to File -> Save as Template...

Name it something like "Drum Notation" and click Save. Now, you have this as a template for
easy access

Okay, I think that does it! Are you still alive? Congratulations for making it through to the end

Theres probably still a lot to learn about this but I think this should give you a pretty solid start to
build from. I think once you get used to the creative workflow of programming drums how you
want them to sound and then just automatically having a formal drum notation composed for
you, youll probably never want to go back to something like MuseScore or let alone, the pricey
Finale and Sibelius Happy notating and happy drumming! Enjoy