How to Read Drum Notation

Series Summary

The drum is the oldest known musical instrument in the history of man and its basic design has not changed in thousands of years. Far from today’s uses as a percussive foundation for pop music or for fueling marching band excitement, drumming has a more profound history as a method of communication, and the drum as an implement of religious symbolism. The drum was perhaps first created from the primal idea of mimicking the human heartbeat, yet today its music has developed into a technical, complex arrangement of beats and grooves. Different sized drums and cymbals are arranged into kits, where a drummer can pick from a variety of sounds to lead or accompany a particular song. Kit sizes vary from the simple to the outrageous.

The modern approach to drumming is to try and master the fundamentals of beat and time signature, and then to create fresh, innovative patterns and fills for each song. In this free instructional video series you will learn how to play several contemporary drum beats. Our expert, Ryan Larson, shares techniques for writing drum beat notation, adding fills, offers tips and advice on how to begin the process and walks you through some great informational steps to becoming a more advanced drummer and musician as you become able to write out your beats.

Video Transcript

"So today, we're going to go through a long piano piece, both hands and we're going to go measure by measure. And what's good about this piece is each measure is geared towards a different rhythm. So, some of the rhythms and different rests are going to come up quicker, but we're going to through this entire piece and you can skip ahead to each one and if you want to learn a specific rhythm or a specific type of rest, you can skip ahead and go to that measure, or you can go through the whole piece with us today. It's good for your classical reading chaps or your jazz reading chaps and what's great about it is, we're going to go through and learn all these different rhythms and we have this nice melodic line here, then we get into some more syncopated raggae-esque type stuff here and we're really doing a lot of rests and it's all syncopated and then we have triplets here and then take it out. Very nice, simple melody and it's all in C major. The great thing about this, is if you can go through and analyze it, again, we number the scale one through seven and you can analyze all these notes out of those seven notes, and if you can analyze it you can play it in any key just like that. And we're going to demonstrate that by playing this exact same thing, reading it in C and playing it in B flat major or A flat major. And again, the more you do this, you can do this with any classical tune, the better your chaps and your site reading skills will get much quicker and you'll get a lot quicker at advancing in those skills because you'll be taking it to another level, which is what you've got to do."