<nathap>

The <nathap> element names the หน้าทับ the music is set against.

หน้าทับ is the drum cycle a piece is played over, carried by instruments such as ตะโพน, กลองแขก, and โทน-รำมะนา. It fixes the length of the cycle and the pattern of strokes inside it, and a musician who is told the หน้าทับ knows how the piece is held together before reading a note of it.

Parent

<direction>

Attributes

Attribute	Required	Type	Description
value	Yes	string	The name of the cycle. See below.

Values

value is a free-form string. The cycles below are the ones worth spelling consistently, but the list is a starting point rather than a closed set, and a score may name any cycle it is played to.

Value	Notes
ปรบไก่	One of the two principal ปี่พาทย์ cycles
สองไม้	The other, shorter and more even
ลาว	หน้าทับ สำเนียงลาว
เขมร	หน้าทับ สำเนียงเขมร
มอญ	หน้าทับ สำเนียงมอญ

An enumeration is not fixed in v1.0 because the repertoire of cycles is larger than any list that could be settled now, and a closed set would reject valid scores. Writing an unrecognized value is legal; a validator warns rather than rejects, so that a typo in a known name still surfaces.

Example

<direction>
  <nathap value="ปรบไก่" />
  <chan value="1" />
  <bpm>60</bpm>
</direction>

What it does

Nothing, in v1.0. <nathap> records which cycle the piece is set against and carries it to whatever reads the file. There is no structured representation of the cycle itself, so the strokes are not derivable from this element and a player cannot sound them from it.

Where a percussion part is actually written out, it is written out: an ordinary <part type="unpitched"> with sound codes, the same as any other instrument. <nathap> names what that part is playing; it does not generate it. What a playback engine chooses to do with the name is its own business.

Like <chan>, it is metadata for files, editors, and players rather than something the page shows. A score that prints หน้าทับปรบไก่ above the grid does so because the arranger wrote it into an <annotation>.

Conformance

• value is required and may be any non-empty string.
• Validators should warn on a value outside the recommended list above, and must not reject it.
• At most one <nathap> per <direction>.

Rendering

หน้าทับ is not printed. See The title band.