Why Yet Another Jembe Notation

Notation systems abound, so why do we need yet another one?  Let's look at what is already out there...

Blob and Stave

Western classical music notation seems to have evolved on an ad-hoc basis, from notating early vocal church music. This was slow, so the first note symbols started with a Breve spanning 2 bars, then dividing down from there to Semi-Breves, Minims, Crotchets, Quavers and halves of those from there.

All of this happened in the age of the quill pen, a "dot" of which would make a line, rather than a dot.  It's remained that way, since ye olde gothic script!

Notating jembe patterns this way is possible, in the same way running in a scuba suit is possible. Just as those long flippers cripple attempts to run, so the assumption that all note times arise by dividing by two is as crippling for most of the world's rhythms. Dividing the "big beats" of a stomping foot into three instead of two, should not be treated as a "special case"!  American attempts to modernize this, actually make things worse; now these note values are described as fractions of a four-four bar, increasing the Western lock-in to what they call the "simple time signatures".

But the killer issue with this notation, is that one cannot type it in plain text, nor can one read it directly to voice. That's why you don't see music notation symbols here; would require scratching around in fonts that may not be present on systems used to read this post.  The same hassle applies to the pretty symbols used by Percussion Studio, as adopted for some books of jembe patterns.  Next!

Vocal Notation

West African patterns are traditionally notated as an oral tradition:

Gun - strong-hand bass (center of drum)
Dun - weak-hand bass

Pe - strong-hand tone (flat hand at rim)
Te - weak-hand tone

Pa - strong-hand slap (hand flick at rim)
Ta - weak-hand slap

Pre - two-hand tone flam
Pra - two-hand slap flam

These phrases alternate in the mouth as easily as their hand actions do on the drum skin; alternating hands is mechanically efficient and thus the most common handing, especially when at the same place on the drum.  

Jembe circles will usually use this method to teach patterns, but it's still clumsy to write; the phrases have different lengths, and a pattern can span much of a line of text.  So, not ideal for email.

Notation Used Here

Western notation is to drumming what Roman numerals are to arithmetic; there's little correlation between spacing on a line, and for what it encodes. It's easy to see that 200 is a bigger number than 18; less obvious when written written as CC vs. XVIII, and the same applies to "blob and stave".

Most of the less formal notations involve spacing symbols to represent the flow of time, e.g....

Gun . Pa Ta Pe Te Pa .

...and as long as one can use a fixed-pitch font (a given in plain text, and nearly every blog comment facility, with Facebook and WhatsApp being abnormally useless in that regard), one can ensure accurate spacing, so that lines of patterns can fit into each other, e.g:

Gun| . |Pa  |Ta  |Pe  |Te |Pa | . |
Gun| . |Pe  |Te  |Gun | . |Pe |Te |

Now we're getting somewhere, but it's still a bit tedious having to space things out and add extra characters to separate stuff.  Also, HTML (increasingly used everywhere) is cavalier with white space, so any double spaces are likely to be "optimized" to a single space.

So on this site, I'll use the following notation, where each instruction is a single character that tells you exactly what to do - what you read is what you do, rather than what you read is what it sounds like, requiring another step to convert that to what you do. Strong-hand actions in Caps, weak-hand actions in lower case, B for bass, T for tone, S for slap and F for flams.  Not quite ideal, as F may be tone flams (more common, so the default) or slap flams, but so far, so good!

B_SsTtS_
B_TtB_Tt

It's tempting to assume Caps are louder than small letters, but this isn't the case; the weak hand beats are not always quieter, it depends on the pattern.  Also, some patterns "wrap around", and that's not easy to see when notated as a single bar, as above.

We can fix the first problem by adding an optional line under the hand actions, to show the dynamics; also an opportunity to add bar lines, sub-bars where applicable, or numbering for bars if needed.

B_SsTtS_
|_-_-_-_

B_TtB_Tt
|_-_-_-_

We fix the second problem by repeating the pattern as played, so it can wrap around: 

B_SsTtS_  B_SsTtS_B_SsTtS_B_SsTtS_B_SsTtS_...
|_-_-_-_  |_-_-_-_|_-_-_-_|_-_-_-_|_-_-_-_...

B_TtB_Tt  B_TtB_TtB_TtB_TtB_TtB_TtB_TtB_Tt...
|_-_-_-_  |_-_-_-_|_-_-_-_|_-_-_-_|_-_-_-_...

Now we're really getting somewhere! We can use : for sub-bar separators, and ! for especially loud beats... but most of the time, the emphasis line is simply the feel of the time signature.

Examples

After a while, just looking at the notation gives clues as to how to approach it.  Alternating hands will show as alternating Upper and lower case; playing "primitives" or fixed hands would look different. 

You can also see potential difficulties; patterns that start with a weak hand on the "one", one-drop where the "one" is not played, wrap-arounds where the pattern doesn't end on a space, and challenging hand movements, such as flam-to-bass.  Here are some examples...

4-beat 4-4 Jembe pattern 1
B_SsTtS_  B_SsTtS_B_SsTtS_B_SsTtS_B_SsTtS_...
|_-_-_-_  1_-_-_-_2_-_-_-_3_-_-_-_1_-_-_-_...

3-beat 3-4 "Jan Pierewiet"
B_TtS_    B_TtS_B_TtS_B_TtS_B_TtS_B_TtS_...

|_-_-_    1_-_-_2_-_-_3_-_-_4_-_-_1_-_-_...

The above shows how different bar lengths can predictably drift in and out of sync, when played at the same tempo (beat timings)... as long as HTML rendering doesn't "eat spaces".  Plain text is best!

3-beat 3-4 slow "triplet trick"
B_t_T_b_T_t_  B_t_T_b_T_t_B_t_T_b_T_t_B_t_T_b_T_t_...
A_-_-_B_-_-_  A_-_-_B_-_-_A_-_-_B_-_-_A_-_-_B_-_-_...

3-beat 6-8 fast "triplet trick"
BtTbTtBtTbTt  BtTbTtBtTbTtBtTbTtBtTbTtBtTbTtBtTbTt...
|__-__|__-__  |__-__|__-__|__-__|__-__|__-__|__-__...

Above you see the difference between 6 divided by 3 for "1 and 2 and 3 and " waltz (3-4) timing, vs. 6 divided by 2 for "1 and then 2 and then " "6-8" timing.  Yes, "blob and stave" blows a fuse when asked to divide by 3; we have to count six quavers instead!  Given the frequent ambiguity in the most interesting patterns, I prefer to speak of "3 beats" and "4 beats" rather than Western signatures.

Bo Diddley-style additive 3+3+2 4-beat 4-4 timing
BtTbTtB_  BtTbTtB_BtTbTtB_BtTbTtB_BtTbTtB_BtTbTtB_...
|__:__:_  |__-__-_|__-__-_|__-__-_|__-__-_|__-__-_...

A similar additive approach to 3-beat
TbTTbb  TbTTbbTbTTbbTbTTbbTbTTbbTbTTbbTbTTbbTbTTbb...
|_:___  |_-___|_-___|_-___|_-___|_-___|_-___|_-___...

You can see the last pattern breaks the "alternating hands" rule that usually suits symmetrical drumming best. I find for arbitrary timings and pulses, fixed-hands may work better; it also helps drive the divide-by-three pulse, as the strong hand is on the louder beats of the pulse.

I'll probably post more on pulses and handings later  :-)