How to edit and review an automatic five-line drum score

Automatic drum transcription is valuable when the first pass remains easy to challenge. Backbeat Forge places source playback, confidence evidence, kit-piece decisions, and five-line notation in the same view so correction happens by ear and by score.

Review in musical order

Start with tempo and meter, then scan the part measure by measure. Check the main kick and snare pattern before smaller cymbal details. Listen again at fills, transitions, pickup notes, open hats, ghost notes, and places where another instrument has a sharp transient. Those decisions affect readability more than polishing every velocity first.

Select and inspect hits

Select a written hit to inspect its kit piece, articulation, timing, velocity, and source confidence. Shift/Ctrl selection can gather multiple events for a shared correction. Confidence is evidence about the detection pass, not a musical grade: a low-confidence hit may be real, and a high-confidence transient may still be assigned to the wrong kit piece.

Add, move, and delete

• Double-click the staff where a missing hit belongs.
• Drag horizontally to change its position in time.
• Drag vertically to move it between kick, snare, tom, hi-hat, ride, or crash placement.
• Delete false positives only after checking the source around the onset.
• Use undo and redo while comparing alternative edits.

Articulation and written rhythm

Adjust velocity when the accent pattern is musically important. Use articulation controls for accents, ghost notes, open hats, rimshots, bells, and chokes when the source supports the decision. Apply grid rewrites the visible rhythmic placement against the selected grid; it should make the chart easier to read, not erase a deliberate groove.

The score renderer and PDF export share the same kit-to-staff semantics. Correcting an event in the workbench therefore changes the printed result rather than only changing a preview lane.

Protect the current draft

Use Save project before a major edit and again after a reviewed section. The .bforge file records the editable score and the workspace that produced it. Read Projects and source recovery for source-file changes and recovery behavior.

When the score reads correctly, continue to Playback and stem mixer and Export PDF and MIDI. Return to the help index at any time.