Zappa: .gp against transcription, repair plan

What the numbers say before any song row

songs on the three albums26 with a drum transcription on disk2 with pitched score only18 with nothing6

The blocker on this plan is source coverage, not tab quality.

Twenty-four of twenty-six songs cannot be checked today, because no professional drum chart for them exists in the archive. Any row claiming a mismatch on those songs would be invented, so every one of them reads not yet measured.

Zappa Analysis cannot vote on drums, and this corrects an assumption in the archive's own coverage file.

_raw/coverage.json credits 18 of these songs with 2 to 11 notation images from Kasper Sloots' Zappa Analysis. I opened 05-zappa-analysis/zomby-woof2.jpg and it is a pitched score: treble and bass clefs, vocal line with lyrics, two keyboard staves, bass in 8vb. There is no drum staff on the page. Those pages settle meter and barring, and nothing about a drum lane.

How each row was decided

Songsterr ids come from the live search API, filtered to Frank Zappa, with the drum track counted by instrumentId 1024. Transcription coverage comes from a directory listing of the archive, not from its index file, because those files are iCloud dataless placeholders that find and mdfind under-report.

One professional transcription is enough to correct a tab. The Songsterr side is a machine guess with a documented failure mode, so a printed chart is not held to a two-of-three vote against it. Two charts are needed only when they disagree with each other.

1. Over-Nite Sensation (1973)

Song	Tab	Drum chart on disk	Named mismatch	Evidence	Route	Effort	Risk
Zomby Woof	s412162, 10 tracks also s5820647, 5 tracks, AI	DRUM Magazine, Drumnet, Bedard, three	measured 32 ghost marks now render as staccato dots in bars 4, 13, 15, 40 to 43. Opening rebarred from one 10/16 to 5/16 plus 5/16. Two toms collapsed onto one drum at bar 4 and 15, slot 16.	`s412162/GHOST-RESTORE-SHORTFALL-2026-09-05.md`, `REV5-BUILD-2026-09-05.md`, `PHASE2-LANE-AUDIT.md`	Revision. File already built and verified: `rev5-Zomby-Woof-GHOSTS-RESTORED.gp`, preflight PASS.	done, pending submit	high 7 of my revisions already queued unreviewed. Adding an eighth is worse than waiting.
Montana	s35870, 18 tracks, 5 drum	none	partly measured 21 impossible hi-hat simultaneities across 12 bars: 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 33, 100, 101, 114, 115, 116, 135. Eight read from context, four cannot.	`MONTANA-HIHAT-COLLISIONS.md`, `MONTANA-TREMOLO-NUMBERS.md`	Revision. Eight bars are decidable now; bars 20, 21, 33 and 135 need a chart or the record.	medium	medium 317 ghost marks already restored by r8907028.
Camarillo Brillo	s412176, s187082	none	not yet measured	pitched score only, 5 images	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
I'm The Slime	s642618 and 4 others	none	not yet measured	pitched score only, 3 images	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
Dirty Love	s35862	none	not yet measured	pitched score only, 5 images	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
Fifty-Fifty	s5469260, s4861438	none	not yet measured	pitched score only, 6 images	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
Dinah-Moe Humm	s6820405 and 2 others	none	not yet measured	pitched score only, 7 images	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown

2. One Size Fits All (1975)

Song	Tab	Drum chart on disk	Named mismatch	Evidence	Route	Effort	Risk
Andy	s21495, 9 tracks also s4691455	DRUM Magazine Groove Analysis	measurable now not yet compared. This is the only song on all three albums that has a chart and no comparison run against it.	`02-drummagazine/GrooveAnalysis_andy.png`	Compare first, then decide. Almost certainly a revision.	one session	medium community tab, 9 tracks
Inca Roads	s412178, 12 tracks, 2 drum	none	partly measured 165 ghost marks were stripped by the 2026-08-29 sweep and restored by r8907511. No lane-level check has been run.	skill `reference/damage-log.md`	Revision, already submitted. Lane check waits on a chart.	blocked	medium the restore is in the moderation queue
Can't Afford No Shoes	s2857465	none	not yet measured	no source at all	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
Sofa No. 1	s6822181	none	not yet measured	no source at all	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
Po-Jama People	s5469788	none	not yet measured	no source at all	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
Florentine Pogen	s2891451, s2024455	none	not yet measured	no source at all	unknown until a chart exists	blocked	unknown
Evelyn, A Modified Dog	s4430002, 1 track, no drums	none	no drum staff to check	tab has no drum track	out of scope	none	none
San Ber'dino	s412171, 5 tracks, no drums	none	no drum staff to check	tab has no drum track	out of scope	none	none
Sofa No. 2	s412180, 7 tracks, no drums	none	no drum staff to check	tab has no drum track	out of scope	none	none

3. Roxy & Elsewhere (1974)

Searched 2026-09-05, and the answer is worse than a missing download. No published drum transcription of any Roxy track appears to exist.

zappa-analysis.com's own catalogue of published Zappa scores names no drum book at all. Its list runs to Barfko Swill full scores, Kai Schnell, Guitar Player Magazine solos, Wolfgang Ludwig's study, Paul Pappas, and roughly 300 pages of Steve Vai guitar transcriptions. Nothing for drums.
Cruise Ship Drummer's Chester Thompson page carries one transcription, Gibraltar, from Weather Report's Black Market. Thompson is the Roxy drummer and Todd Bishop has not transcribed him on this album.
DRUM! Magazine's Groove Analysis series covers Who Are The Brain Police, The Grand Wazoo and Zomby Woof, plus the seven pages already on disk. No Roxy title surfaced.
zappa-analysis.com does hold transcriptions of Pygmy Twylyte, by Wolfgang Ludwig from 1992 with 1974 guitar bars added in 2007, and of Echidna's Arf. Both are pitched score, which cannot vote on a drum lane.

So the closed layer is publication, not access.

The route for Roxy is not another download. It is transcribing the drums from the record, which makes every Roxy row a transcription job rather than a comparison job, and a different kind of work from every other song in this plan.

Song	Tab	Drum track	Status	Pitched-score pages held
Penguin In Bondage	s5469710	yes	not yet measured	11 images, 4 pages
Pygmy Twylyte	s627774, s2847936, s1473002	yes	not yet measured	6 images, 2 pages
Dummy Up	s5469676	yes	not yet measured	none
Village Of The Sun	s412175, s6109180, s6628550	yes	not yet measured	8 images, 3 pages
Echidna's Arf (Of You)	s35891, s2825336, s3387460	yes	not yet measured	4 images, 2 pages
Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?	s2829238, s5469773	yes	not yet measured	2 images, 2 pages
Cheepnis	s5469732	yes	not yet measured	7 images, 1 page
Son Of Orange County	s5469750, s187084	yes on s5469750	not yet measured	5 images, 3 pages
More Trouble Every Day	s187105, s1381481	yes	not yet measured	3 images, 1 page
Be-Bop Tango	s5469948	yes	not yet measured	5 images, 3 pages

Execution order

Each song's execution goes in its OWN chat. The one-Zappa-song-per-chat gate keys on the song id, so a chat that opens on s21495 does not touch s412162.

Andy s21495. The only song here with a chart and no comparison run. Highest value, lowest ambiguity, needs nothing acquired.
Zomby Woof s412162. The repair file is built and passes preflight. The work left is not technical: seven of my revisions sit unreviewed, and the honest move is to wait for a moderator rather than queue an eighth.
Montana s35870. Eight of the twelve collision bars are decidable from the tab's own context. The other four need a source.
Acquisition, before any Roxy work. Nothing on that album is checkable today.

What to acquire, and where

Source	Holds for Zappa	Covers these three albums?	How
drumnet.ru	Oh No, Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar, Whipping Post, Muffin Man, Watermelon In Easter Hay, Zomby Woof	Zomby Woof only	`https://drumnet.ru/fls/sheets/<id>_1.jpg`. A short read there is a truncated transfer, not a dead source: re-fetch with `Accept-Encoding: identity` and a 90 s timeout, then check bytes against the HEAD `Content-Length`.
DRUM Magazine Groove Analysis	Drowning Witch, Keep It Greasey, Andy, Brain Police, Grand Wazoo, Muffin Man, Zomby Woof	Zomby Woof, Andy	already downloaded, 10 files
Cruise Ship Drummer	Central Scrutinizer, Beat It With Your Fist, Rubber Shirt, Dancin' Fool, Apostrophe, Don't Eat The Yellow Snow, Flower Punk, I'm A Beautiful Guy, plus Bedard's charts	none	already downloaded, 22 files
Modern Drummer, Drumset Sheet Music	unknown, both folders hold only a `NOTE.md`	unknown	never fetched. Worth a pass, since Roxy is entirely uncovered.

Method each execution chat follows

Identify the passage on three measures before comparing anything: meter, tempo and event count. Tempo can be measured off the record with librosa.beat.beat_track even where the record cannot settle a single note.
Measure lanes, do not read them. Counting the bottom staff line as lane 0, kick is lane 0.5 and snare lane 2.5. tools/chart_heads.py isolates heads by erosion.
Build the subdivision grid from the hi-hat positions, never by dividing the bar width, which misassigns notes at the ends.
Compare slot by slot. A high agreement rate validates the alignment. A low one means the passages do not correspond and the comparison is void.
Verify against the author's own pre-damage revision as a set difference on (bar, slot, drum, flag), not as a count. A count going up proves nothing.