The particular beat grouping that each bar comprises - a piece’s metre - is dictated by the time signature. Each bar constitutes a unit of time and a grouping of beats, and they help musicians to navigate their way through a piece of music. Bars can be understood as repeating, rhythmic building blocks. In staff notation, music is broken down into bars. So, to use the previous extract as an example, you would have to play the bass drum, followed by the snare, followed by hi-hat, and so on.īut how quickly? As fast as possible, or slowly? With regular gaps in between, or randomly spaced? All these aspects are governed by a range of musical parameters, each of which ultimately relates to timing, or -to be more precise, as all drummers ought to - rhythm. Think of it as a sequence of musical events - reading from left to right, you have to perform one motion after another, and sometimes even several at once. Let’s go back to that idea of the stave as a timeline. On which line a given note appears will determine the playing action to be taken, but in most cases, there’s still no direct relationship to pitch, and rhythm is still paramount. Sheet music written for these instruments might add a parallel line or two to the stave - as below. Some percussion instruments can be played in a number of ways, or combine a few parts. Taking pitch out of the equation, therefore, the percussion stave functions kind of as a timeline, on which the positioning of notes simply corresponds to when the instrument should be played. In the case of the percussion stave, everything’s horizontal. On a five-line stave, the vertical placement of notes dictates the pitch to be played, and as there's a wide range of possible pitches, there's a wide range of lines and spaces to accommodate notes. The rhythm is the same, however - we'll come back to that. Look at the latter (bottom) and you'll see that those notes are all over the place. Look at the former (top) and you’ll notice that all the notes are on that one line. You can see the slimline percussion stave and the standard five-line stave depicted above. This article tells you everything you need to know about that method - how it works, and the steps you need to take to start reading it and - more importantly - start drumming. It’s a unique setup, and in short a unique notational method has been developed to cater to it. That leads us nicely to the second factor, which is that a drum set technically constitutes a collective of instruments. But, you might counter, there are lots of unpitched percussion instruments out there, so what makes the kit special? First, a kit is unpitched, meaning that standard notational principles don’t apply. What makes it so special? It comes down to two factors. But despite this – or perhaps because of it – sheet music for the drum kit utilises one of the most singular systems in the world of notation. Rhythm is something we can all instinctively get on board with.īut these concepts don’t really resonate with the idea and characteristics of sheet music, which is fixed, calculated and cerebral. It has a role in every musical tradition on the planet. Drumming competes with singing for the title of oldest performance practice in the world. Visceral, intuitive, innate - these are just some of the terms that are often tossed around when it comes to drumming.
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