Drum Notation Guide

How to read drum notation

Drum notation is standard music notation with one substitution: instead of pitch, the vertical position of a note tells you which drum to hit. Everything else — bar lines, time signatures, beams, note values, rests — behaves exactly as it does in piano or guitar music.

There are four things to read on every note:

• Vertical position — which drum or cymbal. The bass drum sits in the bottom space, the snare in the middle space, the toms between and above it, and the cymbals on and above the top line.
• Notehead shape — a filled oval is a drum, an ✕ is a cymbal or hi-hat.
• Stem direction — up for your hands, down for your feet. That is why a kick and a hi-hat on the same beat can share a column without colliding.
• Horizontal position — when, in the bar. Notes stacked in the same column are struck together.

The clef at the start is the percussion clef: two thick vertical bars rather than a treble or bass clef. It is a signal, not an instruction — it simply says “the notes on this staff are unpitched, read them against a key”.

The drum key: every drum note explained

This is the standard drum-set key, the layout used by mainstream method books and by the default drum maps in notation software. Learn these nine positions and you can sight-read a chart you have never seen.

• Crash cymbal

  Ledger line above the staff

• Open hi-hat

  Space above the top line

• Closed hi-hat

  Space above the top line

• Ride cymbal

  Top line (5th line)

• High tom

  4th space (top space)

• Mid tom

  4th line

• Snare drum

  3rd space (middle space)

• Floor tom

  2nd space

• Bass drum (kick)

  1st space (bottom space)

• Hi-hat pedal (foot)

  Space below the bottom line

Kits with more drums simply extend the same idea: extra toms fill the remaining lines and spaces between the snare and the top line, and extra cymbals go above the staff on their own ledger lines.

Drum notation symbols

Position and notehead tell you what to hit. The symbols below tell you how to hit it — and they are where most beginners lose the thread of a chart.

• Accent

  A > above the note: hit this one harder than the ones around it.

• Ghost note

  A notehead in round brackets: play it very quietly, almost a whisper.

• Flam

  One small grace note before the main stroke — both hands, almost together.

• Drag

  Two small grace notes before the main stroke, played by the same hand.

• Roll

  Slashes across the stem: subdivide this note into a roll rather than one hit.

• Closed hi-hat

  A plain ✕, sometimes with a + above it if the foot is pressing hard.

• Open hi-hat

  A small o above the ✕: lift the left foot so the cymbals ring.

• Cross-stick

  An ✕ on the snare's space: lay the stick across the head for a quiet click.

• Hand and foot together

  Stems point apart, so a hi-hat and a kick on the same beat never collide.

Drum set notation vs drum tab notation

Drum tab is the plain-text format you see on forums: a row of letters per drum (HH, SD, BD) with x and o marking the hits on a grid of dashes. It needs no software and no reading ability, which is exactly why it exists.

Standard drum-set notation is the five-line staff on this page. It costs more to learn and repays it immediately: it can express note values, rests, dynamics, accents, ghost notes, flams, rolls and time-signature changes, none of which tab handles well. Tab also has no agreed standard, so two tabs of the same groove often disagree.

Learn to read the staff. Use tab when someone hands it to you — the grid maps one-to-one onto the step sequencer on every pattern page, which is the fastest way to translate between the two.

Snare, bass drum and hi-hat notation

Three voices carry almost every groove, so these three are worth memorising first.

• Snare notation: a filled oval in the third (middle) space, stem up. A cross-stick or rim click is the same position with an ✕ notehead; a rim shot is usually marked with a written instruction.
• Bass drum notation: a filled oval in the first (bottom) space, stem down, because it is played with the foot.
• Hi-hat notation: an ✕ in the space above the top line, stem up. A small o above it means open, a + means pressed shut. Played by the foot alone it moves to the space below the bottom line with its stem down.

Ghost notes and flams

A ghost note is a deliberately quiet stroke, written as a notehead inside round brackets. It is not decoration: ghost notes on the snare between the backbeats are most of what makes funk and R&B feel like they are breathing rather than being typed out. Play them at roughly a quarter of the volume of an accent.

A flam is one grace note struck a few milliseconds before the main note, written small with a slash through its stem. Both hands are involved — the grace-note hand starts about an inch above the head, the accent hand about a foot above it, and both drop together. A drag is the same idea with two grace notes, which the same hand plays as a very low, very fast double.

Both live in the rudiments: the flam and the drag each have their own lesson with loopable audio.

Hear it: notation to kit

Below is one bar of the basic rock pattern in notation, then the same bar playing on the kit. Watch which surface lights up as each note goes past — that link between a position on the staff and a drum in front of you is the whole skill.

A busier example: sixteenth notes and accents

Once the eighth-note groove reads easily, this is the next step up: sixteenth notes on the hi-hat with accents on the beats, and a kick that lands between them. Note the two beams on the hi-hat notes — two beams means sixteenths, one beam means eighths, exactly as in any other notation.

Drum notation cheat sheet (PDF)

One page with the full drum key, every symbol on this page and a blank staff to write on — generated from the same data as the figures above, so it can never drift out of sync with them. Letter and A4, no email required.

Frequently asked questions