How To Read Drum Notation

Each musician should be able to read musical notes. Knowing how to read the notes makes it easier to learn music in general. Two main types of notation exist today. The first one is for the leading musical instruments and the second one is for the percussion instruments.

Lead musical instruments are the ones that play the harmony part of music. Guitars, pianos, violins, flutes and other instruments are the lead ones. And drums, congas, cymbals and other percussion instrument are called the rhythm instruments.

Unfortunately, many drummers do not want to learn how to read sheet music. They simply do not understand all importance of it. Knowing how to read the notes will help you to understand drum music much better and you will be able to play much better as well.

Drum notation is not an easy one to learn. Generally, each type of notation follows a certain guideline. However, drum notation is an exception. It does not follow any basic guidelines. We will try to show basic notation for drum music to help you learn it.

A basic notation book consists of 5 lines. These lines are named by the letter of the alphabet: a, b, c and so on. There is a space between every two lines. This means there are four spaces between the lines plus five lines. A note could be located either on the line or in the space between the lines. The bottom line is called the first one and the top one is called the fifth line.

These were the basics and now let us move to a more complicated part. The space above the first line is used for high hats. All the notes for high hats are written on this space. In most cases this space is marked with X.

The rest spaces are used for tom toms. Each tom has its own space. The space below the fifth line is used for the high tom. The space below the fourth line is for the mid tom and the space below the third line is for the low tom. If certain type of music requires more than three tom toms, then a dot below the five lines is used.

Notations for snare drums are written in the third line. These drums are highly important in most music genres.

Notation for cymbals is written above the high hats. Cymbals are also marked with an x sign. A bell stroke on a cymbal is marked with a diamond sign beside the main cymbal sign.

Your feet also participate in drumming. Your right foot plays the bass drum. And notation for it is written on the bottom line. Notation for high hat is written below the first line.

Want to play drums – then this web site will guide you through the realms of how to learn play drums – info, videos, detailed explanations, exactly what one needs to master the drums.

And a final piece of advice – today the online technologies give you a truly unique chance to choose what you want for the best price on the market. Strange, but most of the people don’t use this chance. In real practice it means that you must use all the tools of today to get the info that you need.

Search Google and other search engines. Visit social networks and check the accounts that are relevant to your topic. Go to the niche forums and join the online discussion. All this will help you to build up a true vision of this market. Thus, giving you a real opportunity to make a smart and nicely balanced decision.

P.S. And also sign up to the RSS feed on this blog, because we will everything possible to keep updating this blog with new publications about how to learn to play drums and how to get the best of them.