Gamelan notation ladder-like vertical staff allowed notation of the balungan by dots and also included important drum strokes. "Kepatihan" is widely used in ethnomusicological studies of the gamelan, sometimes accompanied by transcriptions into Western staff notation with approximate mapping of slendro and pelog tuning systems of gamelan onto the western staff, with and without various symbols for microtones. The relative merits of "kepatihan" and staff notation are sometimes debated, but staff notation is essentially incompatible with the 'end-weighted' nature of melodic structures in Indonesian music. In this respect, "kepatihan" is more suitable, although the usage of overscores (taken from the Galin-Paris-Chevé system)
Gamelan Bali, remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." This view is contested, however, by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan "Manikasanti", which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles. Balinese gamelan instruments are built in pairs that are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of