Drums

One or more **drum spines/columns/tracks in a Ratioscore will be converted into drum tracks. Drum notes are General MIDI key numbers ranging from 35 to 81.

Unlike ratio tracks, drum tracks can contain multiple notes at one time:

Percussion names

Here are the names of the instruments in a drum track

Below is an example of giving instrument names to the note numbers. The letters v and V are deaccent and accent marks respectively.

The attack velocity and volume system for ratio spines also applies to drums:

Polyrhythm example:

See the Polyrhythm generator page.

Mixing pitched and percussive instruments

Drum and ratio tracks may occur in the same score and can be interleaved in any order. Any number of drum tracks can be present in the score, but ratio tracks are limited to 15 due to the structure of MIDI.

Unlike **ratio spines which are limited to 15, any number of **drum tracks can be added to a Ratioscore. However, since all percussion insturments are played on the same MIDI channel, independent panning of parallel **drum tracks is not possible.