How To Read Drum Music, the Basics.

For drummers not taking lessons from a private instructor, learning to read drum music can present a challenge. So I thought I'd do a series of videos on youtube about how to read drum music.

It's turning out to be a fun project, minus the technical challenges and also finding a good way to really dig into the drum music notation and present it. While the vids are decent as a stand alone thing, I thought a few images and notation might help you guys understand drum and drumset music notation a bit better.

So to get us started, take a look at the How To Read Drum Music, The Basics, that I made over on youtube.

Hopefully that was crystal clear! But if not, fear not!

Let's look at a few basic charts to help you drummers along!

This first note shows the value of each note and the value of each associated rest. It also shows you, numerically or counting wise, an equivalent set of notes. So for instance, the third line down show us that two quarter notes occupy the same time, or beat value, as one half note. Relate that to what I talked about in the vid and it should help make this part clear.

Here is another chart, showing eqivalent notes based on a numerical value or the "beat". For example we know in 4/4 time that the quarter note gets the beat. So we can go down the chart and see that two eight notes have the same value as one quarter note. So there is one quarter note to the beat, and then it follows that there are two eight notes to each beat. Then 4 sixteenth notes, and so on.

And again, for drum music, here are some notes and the names of their values.

And then we have their equivalent rests.

REMEMBER! The 5 horizontal lines are called the STAFF and the vertical line is called a BAR LINE.

REMEMBER! The funny shape at the front is the CLEF. This one is a treble clef. For drum music we use a Drum Clef. The numbers are the TIME SIGNATURE. They tell us what "beat" value the notes have and how many beats per measure. For instance. 4/4 time is 4 beats each measure, and the quarter note gets the beat. 2/4 time is 2 beats per measure and the quarter note gets the beat. And so on.

That should help with the basics for now. I hope this helps! I will do some more advanced stuff on reading music for drums soon!