For my final year project I designed and developed a drum tabbing program to assist in the performance of drum tabs. Having played guitar for several years I was surprised when I began learning to play the drum kit last year at the lack of drum tutorial programs available, considering the vast array of such programs that exist for the guitar. While learning the drums I considered how much assistance a program that could clearly display drum tabs that even a novice could understand would provide me and potentially other beginner drummers.
There are four main criteria that I felt my project should meet.

• Firstly I wanted my program to be capable of reading a wide range of currently existing tabs. I felt that it was essential that a song or tab would not have to be specially written to work with my program, since I wanted my program to give the users access to whatever songs they wanted to perform.
• Secondly, I wanted the user to have some sort of feedback on how well they are performing the tab. To do this I would need to incorporate some sort of drum detection for electronic drum kits.
• I felt that the system should provide the user with an intuitive display, potentially something that the user would be familiar with and be able to customize, while also requiring little if no prior musical knowledge to understand.
• Lastly I wanted my program to be able to incorporate some sort of frequency analysis to cater to drum detection with acoustic drum kits.

The final product became quite a valuable tool for me when it came to learning how to play new songs, as it provided a pretty simple breakdown of the songs. I’m still intending to attempt to flesh this project out at some point, as I still think there’s a potential market for this sort of product