ABOUT GROOVE SCRIBE

Create and share drum grooves, print sheet music, and more. Groove Scribe is FREE for everyone! Presented by American drummer & composer Travis Brant.


Keyboard Shortcuts

Spacebar - Start/Stop midi playback
Ctrl-Z - Undo
Ctrl-Y - Redo
Left Arrow - Tempo Down
Right Arrow - Tempo Up
CTRL and mouse over - turn on notes
ALT and mouse over - turn off notes


Metronome

4ths - adds a cowbell on the 1 and a click on the 2, 3, and 4;
8ths - Adds a click on all the "ands" (plays 8th note triplets in triplet subdivisions)
16ths - Adds a softer click on every 16th note. Plays a louder click on the 2, 3, and 4. (plays 16th note triplets in triplet subdivisions)
Solo - Plays the metronome, and mutes the groove when the play button is pressed.
Auto Speed Up - Will increase the metronome BPM automatically after each loop through.
Offset click - Allows the metronome to accent the "e", "&", or "a", instead of the 1.


Swing

The level of swing varies widely and generally left to the performer to determine. The classic triplet swing feel shows up at 33% on the swing meter. For a tighter swing feel (dotted 8th followed by 16th) move the meter to 50%, full swing. Swing is a matter of personal taste so please feel free to practice your grooves with different amounts of swing until you find the feel that you are looking for. Wikipedia has a good article on the types of swing.

Editing

• The "Hi-hat", "Snare", "Kick" and "Sticking" labels to the left of the editing grid have a menu when clicked. You can quickly turn all the notes in a measure on or off using the menu.
• Right click the notes to access special notes, like ghost notes, hi-hat open, flams and drags. On a touch device, use the "Advanced Edit" button to access the special notes.
• Use the Grooves menu to select a groove close to the one you want, or use it to clear the editing grid to start a new groove from scratch.
• You can change the notes while playing the groove and hear what you are doing while editing.

Toms

Groove Scribe supports tom notation.

Sticking

Groove Scribe supports hand sticking patterns. ‘Sticking’ essentially defines patterns that you play with your right and left hands. For example: R L R R | L R L L

Downloading

Download your Groove Scribe creations as an image or MIDI file. Easily share your files on social media or email. Supported file types include SVG, PNG, and MIDI. MIDI files allow musicians and audio developers to transfer sequenced musical data from one software application to another, without regard to computer operating systems. Unlike regular audio files (MP3s or WAVs), MIDI files don't contain actual audio data. Instead, they explain what notes are played, when they're played, and how long or loud each note should be.

Printing

Print your Groove Scribe creations for practicing without a computer or mobile device. Print your Groove Scribe creations using a PDF writer and share your creations with fellow drummers.

Sharing

The sharing feature of Groove Scribe is really well thought out. Easily create links to your groovy creations and share them to social media or in email, without the need to create an online account or save your data.

Groove Scribe Is Free

Groove Scribe is free open-source software. Open-source software is computer software released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.

Download Groove Scribe

Groove Scribe is designed to run in a web browser, like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. This means for best performance it should be installed on a web server. There are thousands of web server hosting options available, even some free options. A quick Google search will yield a list of free web hosts. To download Groove Scribe visit GitHub.com.