This article is based on an earlier description of TUBS in RoR notation.
The notation system for samba-fusion music we use on the XR Player is the Time Unit Box System (TUBS), which was created in the 60s by the musicologists Philip Harland and James Koetting to notate West African drumming (where samba originates, as it happens). Like most things in XR Rhythms, how we do it is based on Rhythms of Resistance.
Timing
Our samba-fusion tunes are made of beats, bars and notes. A beat is the basic regular pulse or tick of the music. Each bar has four beats – you can count beats by stepping or swaying as you play.
Notes are what you actually play. A note per beat is called a quarter note (as there are four of them in a bar). Two notes per beat gives 8th notes (eight to a bar), and four notes per beat is 16th notes (sixteen to a bar). Snare players play 16s when rolling with a tune.
A TUBS grid
Here’s 4 Hits and Clave notated using TUBS. You can see the “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” count to show 8th notes on the top, and then each beat is divided into its four 16s.
Knowing exactly where the beat is helps you play samba-derived rhythms with “gaps” in (sometimes known as “pushes”) like Clave. A top tip is that every note will either be together with an 8th note or just after one, so try counting 8s if something like Custard isn’t behaving.
Karla 16s
Here’s Karla Break and Progressive Karla, which have everyone playing 16s. (Or 8s if you’ve only got one stick.) Basic Karla Break is three bars of 16s (first bar quiet, second one medium, third one loud) then one note on the first beat and three beats of silence. Basic Progressive Karla is one bar of quarters, one bar of 8s, one bar of 16s, then one note on the first beat and three beats of silence too. (E means everyone playing together in a break – more on that later!)
A main tune tubs grid
On this tune sheet for the main part of Karla, you can see how the snare plays the 16s. Quiet snare notes are marked with a dot (.), louder snare accents with x.
Most instruments in Karla have a pattern that loops every bar (i.e. every four beats). However, the tam pattern lasts two bars, and the surdo patterns repeat for three bars then change to something else for the fourth bar.
We can notate these repeats with a number and x, with the part that gets repeated in {curly brackets}.
If a pattern is mostly repeated but a middle bit changes, we can show it with a first time, last time etc. part as well.
You can always check the written out notation against the notes view on the XR Player (as well as listening to it, of course!). We’ve linked them here to help.
Oh Where, have the shakers gone?
If you’re noticing a lack of shaker parts on the tune sheets, that’s because we leave it up to shaker players whether they want to do a classic samba stream of 16s (stopping during breaks), follow the snare or tam parts, or do some combination of both. The XR Player audio has a suggestion too, but that’s mainly so shaker isn’t just missing.
Triplets
Sometimes we divide a beat into three notes instead of four (called a triplet). If it’s just for one beat we mark it with dashes (x – x – x). It’s not unheard of for a beat to divide into six! (Tunes like Bhangra divide the beat into three the whole way through.)
Strokes
Note symbols help describe which stroke to use (how you’re hitting your instrument).
On this grid for Samba Reggae, for example, 0 tells the surdo players to press the drum skin with their free hand/beater to “dampen” the resonance of the drum. (If you use your hand, it’s a good idea to keep your second beater in your belt for breaks that need both.)
List of strokes for different folks
Here are the different strokes we use in the notation:
| Symbol | Name | Who? | Basic description |
|---|---|---|---|
| x | Hit | Everyone except agogô | A normal hit. Don’t be shy! |
| 0 | Mute (Pat) | Surdos, repi (one stick) | Stop the drum from sounding with your free hand or other beater |
| sil | Muted hit (Silenced) | Surdos, repi (one stick) | A quieter hit while your other hand/beater mutes. Can freely swap/be swapped with 0 |
| ri | Rim click | Surdos, repi (one stick) | Hit the rim of your drum with your stick. Our recycled drum kit surdos usually hit the other end of a beater against the side of the drum instead |
| . | Soft hit (Shadow/ghost note) | Snare, repi (two stick) | A quiet hit (compared to a louder x) |
| z | Buzz (Flare) | Repi (either), snare | For one wood stick on a repi (and a quiet version for snare): several loud bounces of the stick on the drum head. For two plastic rods on a repi: a few quick hits before a main note. |
| l | Low bell | Agogô | The bigger, lower-pitched of the two bells on the agogô (use it during breaks by default) |
| h | High bell | Agogô | … and the smaller, higher-pitched one |
No need to memorise all this! Our notation PDFs have a quick symbols key at the bottom of each page.
Break symbols
Like we were saying, for breaks we use an abbreviated set of stroke symbols that group instruments playing together. It’s usually E – everybody, A – everybody else answers, R – repi, S – all surdos together (and there’s a key at the bottom of each PDF page too), but strokes like buzzes and soft hits can pop up as well.
Conclusion
As useful as TUBS grids are, we can’t show everything on them. For things like speed and loudness we have to add written comments or leave that up to the band.
It’s helpful to learn how to read TUBS grids and listen to the XR Player, but not necessary (and even then it’s only a starting point): samba-fusion music is informal and involves lots of reinterpretation. Nothing beats learning together!