Drum notation key

Drum music uses the same five-line staff as everything else, but the lines and spaces mean drums, not pitches. Here is the key most charts use, and the handful of marks that come up constantly.

Where each drum lives

From the bottom of the staff up, and with the percussion clef (two vertical bars) at the start:

Drums get round noteheads. Cymbals get an x. That one convention lets you tell at a glance whether a note is a hand on a cymbal or a stick on a drum.

Stems and beams

In most drum charts all stems point up and notes that fall on the same beat share a stem. Beams group notes by beat, which is what makes a bar readable: four beamed groups in 4/4, two groups of three in 6/8. Eighth notes have one beam, sixteenths two, thirty-seconds three.

Rests

When nothing is played for part of a beat, a rest fills the gap. A whole-bar rest is a small rectangle hanging from the fourth line. In practice, drum charts use rests sparingly: a note lasts until the next one in the beat, so a kick on 1 followed by a snare on 2 is written as two quarter notes, not a kick, a rest and a snare.

Accents and ghost notes

A small > above a note means hit it harder. A notehead in parentheses is a ghost note: played very quietly, felt more than heard. Funk and shuffle grooves live on ghost notes.

Open and closed hi-hat

A hi-hat note with a small o above it is played open. A + means closed, or closing. A note marked o+ opens on the hit and closes with the foot before the next note, the "soup" sound on an off-beat.

Repeats and counts

A thick bar line with two dots is a repeat sign. In a chart, the groove inside the repeat plays the number of times written beside it, such as ×4. That is the whole trick of a one-page chart: a two-bar groove and a number stand in for sixteen bars.

Dynamics and tempo

Letters under the staff set the volume: pp very quiet, p quiet, mp and mf in the middle, f loud, ff very loud. A long hairpin opening to the right is a crescendo, getting louder; closing to the right is a decrescendo. A tempo above the staff, such as a quarter note equals 120, sets the speed; a new one mid-chart means the speed changes there.

Tuplets

A small 3 over a group means three notes in the time of two: triplets. Shuffles and swing feels are usually written as triplets with the middle note left out. A 6 means sextuplets, six in the space of four sixteenths.

Every example on this page was drawn by Rhythm Writer from a grid. Tap the hits, and the staff appears.