Melody with drone

One solution is not to write the drones at all in the score, but simply to state what they are at the beginning. This is the approach most often adopted in staff notation of music that uses drones. But this too has its drawbacks if the goal is to represent what listeners actually hear. 

Omitting the drones makes the music look different than it sounds, requiring the reader to “remember” the presence of sounds not indicated in the score. As a result, the score fails to capture a feature essential to the aesthetics of drone-based music: the shifting harmonic combinations formed by melody notes and drones together.

To bring out that feature while keeping melody and drones distinct, it is desirable to write the drone sounds into the score but in a different manner from the melodic pitches. This can be done by writing the drone sounds with lines somewhat thinner than those used in the symbols for other sounds of specified pitch (though still thicker than any of the pitch lines). Moments where a melody note coincides with a drone pitch will then be distinguishable by a thicker line superimposed on the one representing the drone.

Admittedly, the proliferation of different line thicknesses is difficult to manage when writing by hand, and though easy to produce using graphics software, it may tax the reader’s ability to distinguish the various types of line by thickness alone. To mitigate these issues, it may be worth using color. Remembering the principle that color is used (if at all) for symbols representing sounds you can hear, the drones will then appear in color as well as the melody.

Theoretically, the red horizontal lines representing the drone sounds should have a thin black pitch line in the middle, since each drone falls on one of the scale degrees. However, that would be redundant if we consider that a drone pitch is practically always one of the pitches of the scale used in the melody it accompanies, so a drone symbol is also a pitch line by implication.

Instead, we can use a pitch line in the middle of a drone symbol only for a drone that falls on the tonic pitch, to distinguish it from other drones. (Actually, the tonic usually is one of the drone pitches, if not the only one - the Great Highland Bagpipes are an exception to the rule.) In this case, the tonic pitch line is drawn the same thickness as other pitch lines to avoid obscuring the drone symbol, though still extended at both ends as usual.

The practice is illustrated here with the tune “Small Coals and Little Money” played on the Northumbrian smallpipes, an English bagpipe that normally uses drones on both the tonic and the fifth scale degree. This time, the length of time for which the drones sound before the melody begins is not specified as it is not considered musically significant.

In monochrome, it becomes less obvious which drone is the tonic, although this information is still available from the extended pitch line at the beginning and end of each system.