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Most types of percussion instruments do not have discrete pitches. However, in Musician they have pseudo pitches.

If a staff is specified as a 5-line drum staff, then note drum notes might look something like this:

Each drum instrument has a distinct pseudo pitch.

 

NOTE: Starting in Notation Musician version 2.0, accidentals for pseudo drum pitches are now represented with distinct drum noteheads.  The notehead is for no accidental; the upward pointing triangle notehead indicates a sharp; and the downward pointing triangle notehead indicates a flat.  For example, the General MIDI pitch for Side Stick is C#, indicated in the above example with the upward pointing triangle notehead.

 

Usually, you will not want give a percussionist a drum part with such pseudo pitches. If you have imported a MIDI file with such a percussion staff, then you can use the Split Drums command, to produce individual 1-line staves for each distinct drum instrument, as illustrated here:

You can associate various drum instruments with different keys on your music keyboard, independently of the pseudo pitches. This enables you to play the drum notes on your music keyboard using keys that are most convenient for you to play while recording a drum part. For more information, see Managing Drum Note Lists.

For a given 5-line or 1-line drum staff, you can specify what notehead shape will be used for the notes in the staff. By default, the notehead shape is an . You can assign a different notehead shape among these choices: , , , , or . You can also change the notehead shape of individual notes, as described in Editing Notehead Shape.