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 seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. A full gamelan will include a set of instruments in each tuning, and classically only one tuning is used at a time. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and gives each ensemble its own particular flavour. A set of gamelan instruments will be tuned to the same set of notes, but the tuning will vary from one gamelan to the next, including variations in the size of intervals. Colin McPhee , a Canadian composer who spent much time in