What's with the membranophone?

MusicBrainz
1

I notice on many releases that performers who should be playing drums are playing the membranophone… is that a new trend in music?

2

No, it’s a trend in pedantry, and not very new.

Behold: Drums vs. drumset

4 Likes
3

Oops, sorry for opening old wounds…

3 Likes
4

Heh, repent by reading all the way through that thread (please don’t).

5

I hurt me finger scrolling… ouwie…

6

If it’s any consolation, there’s a userscript you can use to easily change any “membranophone” credits to “drums (drum set)”.

2 Likes
7

I imagine there’s thousands of wrong entries… no thanks :slight_smile: It might even be easier to change all “membranophone” entries in the database to “drum set” and then fix the real membranophone back. What say the statistics?

8

Hey, we’re down to only 1300 or so pages of membranophone credits; at one time there were well over 2000. So in another 3 years or so we should have them all cleaned up.

5 Likes
9

While doing some research on ‘instruments’, I just noticed this sentence on the official MusicBrainz instruments list page:

For specific drums not yet in MusicBrainz, use membranophone (or slit drum, if appropriate) and consider [requesting the missing instrument]

If there now is a common agreement that the membranophone should be killed with fire, shouldn’t this sentence/advice be changed accordingly?

2 Likes
10

I should probably point out that there’s a batch-edit ticket in the pipeline to get rid of all of the existing “membranophone” relationships. These need to be cleaned up before we can nuke the instrument entity.

2 Likes
11

That’s great.
But removing the still present advice to editors to use ‘membranophone’ could be removed now, no?

3 Likes