If you don’t know whether it means a drum set or what, use unspecified drum, if you know it’s not a drum set but is a membranophone, use membranophone. I suspect in most cases it will be unspecified drum, because it’s hard to know for sure.
If it’s a rock or metal or whatever album, it’s mostly safe to assume it’s drum set (unless it’s some sort of shaman drum in a folk metal album, but 
)
Ok, got it. If it’s obviously a single unspecified drum I use membranophone 
Well, again, this was something that made sense when I did it, since at that time it said:
drum [tambora from Dominican Republic]: Dave Pattman
If the current recommendation is to use
membranophone [tambora from Dominican Republic]: Dave Pattman
…then I have to agree with hiccup, I would not want to see that outside of a purely academic setting.
Faced with that option, I would personally be inclined to go even more generic in order to use a word that people may actually recognize:
percussion [tambora from Dominican Republic]: Dave Pattman
In the “we know the instrument” case, the best approach is in any case to request it so that the specific instrument gets added and we don’t need to think anymore about what not-quite-exact instrument to put it under
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/60740828
Should the “drums” in this edit be unspecified drum or membranophone?
I actually suspect they’re a drum set (because of the credit being drums and percussion). But without more specific info, I would personally leave them as unspecified.
Looking at what appears in the “credited as” for this instrument, would we really want to add instrument entities for all of these?
“african drums”
“South Indian drums”
“clay drums”
“ethnic drums”
“Ugandan drum”
“pottery drum”
…etc.
No, those are not specific instruments - we don’t really know what’s being played there. I meant for cases like tambora, or kwadum, or esukuti, which are specific instruments but also listed there at the moment
Agreed, but they’re also not unspecified.
They’re quite unspecified, really, in the sense that “African drums” could still be a few hundred different things, and “ethnic drums” could basically mean anything, at least without a clear context. But I’d probably still use “membranophone” for those, because we know they’re unlikely to be a drum set.
Quick question:
When I encounter these ‘membranophone’ errors, should I correct them, or would that be a waste of time since a bot will be going to do that?
If you know what type of drum, then set it. A bot cannot ever fix this.
There’s discussion on an edit whether a credit for performing membranophone should be changed to:
Any clarification would be appreciated, thanks.
I would go with #1. Virtually nothing is actually credited as “drums (drum set)” on cover art, so option #2 would require a “credited as” on every single credit. That’s a lot of work for no significant benefit that I can see.
I think this is right, but then the question becomes: why is this instrument called drums (drum set) instead of just drums?
Because “drums” is a very generic word that really doesn’t mean much. While “drum set” or “drum kit” is the specific name for the drums that most rock/pop/jazz bands play. But in the sloppy world of album sleeve credits, most just called it “drums”. Most editors of MB then picked the instrument “drums”, which represented the entire drum family instead of the more correct “drum set”. So the instrument “drum set” had it’s name changed to “drums (drum set)” so editors would choose it when entering a “drums” credit, and (drum set) was left on as disambiguation so we’d know that this entity represents the specific instrument and not the abstract grouping of every drum ever invented.
What you say makes sense, but if “drum set” is meant to disambiguate the instrument why was it added to the name of the instrument and not the disambiguation comment?
I assume because it still is the real name of the instrument.
Is this thread still going anywhere? What became of the original topic/question? Was it ever resolved?
For my 10c worth, can I suggest yet another variant. I am currently using “drums (drum set)” whenever I enter drummer credits. It might make it slightly less confusing to call it “drums (generic drum set)”. What do y’all think?
I don’t see how “generic drum set” makes anything clearer. Is there a specific type of drum set that it needs to be distinguished from?