Happy Monday, folks! Today we’re glad to welcome back MXTabs.net Forum Moderator pie21, who back in December wrote a wonderful post about How to Read a Drum Tab that Uses ASCII Text. Since that time he’s been hard at work developing his very own drum tab editor – called “Taboo” – and today he’s ready to share his creation with the rest of the MXTabs.net community. Be sure to check it out – Free Download of Taboo: An ASCII Drum Tab Editor.

What Is Taboo?

Taboo is purely and simply a drum tablature editor written by a drummer to give drummers out there a more powerful way to work with ASCII drum tablature. It lets you create and edit drum tabs quickly and naturally in an ASCII environment without putting any complicated interface between you and your music. There are one or two other drum tab editors out there, but they seem intent on taking your input and telling you how the tab will look, rather than giving you complete control.

Why Would I Use Taboo?

Consider how you currently write drum tabs (assuming you do, or how you would) – probably with a text editor like Microsoft Word or Notepad. The problem with using these programs for editing drum tablature is that they were designed to effectively handle lines of words, rather than lines of columns of characters. Taboo was designed specifically to create and manipulate ASCII drum tablature, so it’s intuitive to use and provides many powerful commands to modify meaningful regions of text, rather than words and paragraphs. The aim is to offer comprehensive functionality while keeping the controls and interface as simple and clean as possible.

At the end of the day, tabbing can often be a frustrating process. Taboo attemps to dissolve the tedious bits, like pressing letters on your keyboard to add notes, or adding extra -’s to each line to extend a bar, so that you can quickly write 95% of your tab with the mouse and a few keys and get on to the fun part of playing your song.

What Can Taboo Do?

Before we start, it should be mentioned (for clarity) that the program keeps a few lists of all the available drums and the notes for each one that you can use in your tab. This lets you scroll through the available options with a simple click of the mouse. These lists are completely customizable, so you can add uncommon notes and drums if you need them or remove the ones that aren’t present in your song.

You can check out the documentation for a full, detailed list of available commands, but here’s a brief summary:

Simple clicks perform basic edit operations. Left clicking on a note will change the symbol of the note by scrolling one step through the list of available notes. You’ll be using this most often to turn a – into an o or x. Right clicking on the other hand will clear any note to a -. Clicking the drum label with the left/right mouse button will scroll forwards/backwards through the available drums.

Modifier key combos (Ctrl, Shift and Alt) allow you to perform more complex operations with the same level of simplicity. A single click from the left mouse button can create empty lines of tab and line breaks. A simple right click can reset entire bars or lines to -’s or delete lines of tab.

Most songs are quite similar throughout, so you’ll often be wanting to copy and paste chucks of tablature that you’ve already written. Taboo lets you cut or copy just about any arbitrary rectangle of text with 2 clicks, and provides a range of single-click paste methods to suit almost any situation, such as overwriting, inserting inline, or inserting below.

Any patterns you find yourself pasting often can be saved as templates to a kind of persistent clipboard – you can restore any of these templates to be pasted with a single click.

Most of these more fundamental operations have been implemented, but the most exciting area is the non-essential commands that are right at your fingertips for your convenience. Pull down the Edit menu and you’ll be able to remove every empty line in the tab with a single click or add/remove the lines of count below every staff. Speaking of the count, you can also instruct the program to add a line of count below every new staff you create, and update it automatically whenever you change the length of a line.

Taboo is still relatively early in development, so these commands have some great potential for growth. There are also a number of major features planned for the near future, such as Live Input (playing the keyboard like a drum kit to create a tab), Live Output (audio playback), and eventually direct conversion to sheet music notation.

Wow! Where Can I Get Taboo?

The fact that Taboo is still in active development and something of a niche product means it doesn’t quite warrant its own website yet. However, all the progress so far has been recorded in the Taboo Thread on the MXTabs.net Forum, and that’s where you can get your Free Download of Taboo: An ASCII Drum Tab Editor. It’s also where you can leave any questions and comments. There’s a strong chance anything you bring up will find a way into the next version!

And finally, a big thank you to all the users out there who’ve shown their support by downloading Taboo and especially leaving their constructive feedback. Your demand is making this happen, and there will always be further development so long as there is interest. Grab Taboo now, and keep in touch!