A newcomer's quest: Scoring apps for drum notation on a budget

I have a past life in music. In the late 1990s, I produced one of the first online fanzines and wrote for several street press magazines in London and Melbourne. In the middle of that, I also played in bands in the UK and Australia, playing guitar and, latterly, drums. And then I stopped. My musical creative spark had run out. Fast forward to about 2021, and it returned, primarily due to relearning the instruments I had always played by “feeling” in the past. Actively learning instruments and production techniques familiar to me properly opened my musical mind again, and I am slowly producing music I always wanted to make in the past before joining rock bands.

More on that in the future. This post covers one of the techniques I’ve been relearning. Writing and playing sheet music, specifically for me, for drum patterns.