Music Hub › Guides › Getting started › Reading and Writing Drum Notation: the Staff, Symbol by Symbol

One Staff, a Different Clef: What the Neutral Clef Changes

This guide assumes the staff itself (the five lines, the four spaces), note values (whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth), their rests, the dot and the tie are already familiar ground: another Music Hub guide covers that foundation in detail for classic melodic notation, and there's no need to revisit it here. What changes when that same staff is used to notate a drum pattern comes down to a single substitution, but it flips the reading logic on its head: the treble or bass clef gives way to a neutral clef, also called a percussion clef, made of two parallel vertical bars stretching from the second line up from the bottom to the second line down from the top of the staff. This clef doesn't fix a pitch on any line — quite the opposite, it announces that no line on this staff will fix one, and that the staff has to be read against an entirely different mapping.

On a melodic staff, a note's vertical position alone resolves its exact pitch, as detailed in the guide devoted to the treble and bass clefs. On a drum staff, that same vertical position resolves a different question: which piece of the kit to hit. The kick drum, the snare, each tom, the hi-hat, the ride, the crash each get a fixed position on the staff, and it's that position, not a measurable pitch, that tells one instrument from another on the page. A drum pattern often stacks several pieces of the kit on the same beat without any of them being higher or lower in the harmonic sense of the word, even though the highest vertical position is conventionally reserved for the pieces that themselves sound highest to the ear — a choice that's far from arbitrary, and one the next section details.

This swap of clefs isn't a graphic whim: nothing in the ordinary staff anticipated this use case, and it had to be invented and then genuinely spread before it stuck. For a long time, every publisher, every teacher, every studio drummer cobbled together their own staff-position convention, which made a drum chart unreadable from one notebook to the next without a dedicated legend, often printed at the head of the score to clear up any ambiguity before the first bar. That legend, often called a drum key, is in fact still a common precaution among many publishers today, precisely because the convention detailed in this guide, widely shared as it is, has never carried the force of a rule set in stone.

A Convention Born of a Real Need: Where and When It Took Shape

The need to standardise drum notation isn't new, and it's well documented. As early as 1978, an article published in the journal Percussionist reported on the work of the Percussive Arts Society's (PAS) Notation and Terminology committee, the leading professional association of percussionists in the United States, a committee then chaired by Frank McCarty: it tackled head-on the widening gap between the diversity of modern kits and the lack of any shared standard for notating them. The project then continued inside the PAS itself: in 1994, drummer and educator Norman Weinberg published, in the association's journal Percussive Notes, a first set of guidelines devoted specifically to the drum staff. That work led, in 2002, to a full reference work in its own right, Weinberg's Guide to Standardized Drumset Notation, which gathers and formalises the whole convention — instrument position, notehead shape, articulation symbols — into a single document. That guide has since been adopted by the PAS itself as its official reference, and its conventions are now built directly into the most widely used notation software, Finale, Sibelius and Dorico, which is why a computer-generated drum chart looks, from one program to the next, like the one a publisher prints.

This wasn't the PAS's first attempt at standardisation: back in 1984, it had already adopted an official list of 40 International Snare Drum Rudiments, including flams, drags and the various types of rolls detailed further on in this guide. This double standardisation — of the rudiments themselves and of their notation — explains why a flam or a drag is written in an almost identical way today, whether the score comes from an American teaching method, a French edition, or notation software.

This convention nonetheless remains a widely followed recommendation rather than an absolute rule enshrined in a binding international standard, unlike the melodic staff itself, which has been settled for centuries. It can therefore vary on specific details from one publisher to the next, particularly for rarer pieces of the kit (china, splash, bell) or for compound articulations like the cross-stick detailed further on. That's why so many printed drum charts still open with a small legend before the first bar — the drum key mentioned above — that clears up whatever ambiguity is specific to that particular edition before you start reading.

The Placement Convention: Where Each Piece of the Kit Goes

Once the neutral clef is in place, the convention that grew out of the PAS's work and Weinberg's guide spreads the pieces of a standard kit from low to high, from the bottom of the staff to the top, following a simple principle: the real relative pitch of each drum, however imprecise that is compared with a musical note, is reflected in its vertical position on the staff, exactly as it would be on a melodic staff. The kick drum, the lowest piece of the kit, occupies the space at the very bottom of the staff. The snare, whose dry, cutting timbre serves as a landmark for the ear (a role covered in its own right in the hub's guide on building a drum groove), sits in the centre of the staff, in the third space up from the bottom, just above the middle line. The toms spread across the rest of the staff following their own pitch: the floor tom, the lowest of the toms, sits just above the kick drum; the mid and high toms then climb toward the top of the staff as their own real pitch rises.

This logic — low position for a low sound, high position for a high sound — lets a drummer sight-read a kit they've never played without having to memorise an arbitrary legend for every new score: the eye correctly anticipates that a higher note on the staff corresponds to a physically higher-pitched piece, even though, unlike on a melodic staff, no precise interval (a third, a fifth) separates these positions. Two toms sitting side by side on the staff never indicate a measurable interval between them, only an order: the one on top sounds higher than the one below, with no figure quantifying the gap.

The exact number of toms, and so the number of positions they actually occupy, varies from kit to kit: a one-tom kit uses only one position, a four- or five-tom kit occupies just as many. It's precisely this variability, combined with the lack of a standard as binding as the one governing the melodic staff mentioned earlier, that justifies how often a legend appears at the head of a score: it spells out, kit by kit, exactly which piece each position corresponds to whenever the setup strays from the standard kit the general convention is based on.

The Cross-Shaped Notehead: How Cymbals Stand Out at a Glance

Position on the staff isn't always enough to tell two pieces of the kit apart at a glance, especially for a reader still unfamiliar with the convention detailed above. Drum notation therefore adds a second layer of coding, independent of position: the shape of the notehead itself. A drum — whether the kick, the snare or a tom — keeps the filled oval notehead inherited from classic melodic notation. A cymbal, on the other hand — whether the hi-hat, the ride or the crash — replaces that oval with a cross, an x drawn directly on the line or in the space that corresponds to it.

This graphic choice isn't arbitrary: a cymbal doesn't produce a clean attack and a short decay the way a drum does, but a much more diffuse sound, rich in inharmonic frequencies, that doesn't sit well with the same round notehead used for a drum's dry attack. The cross works as a deliberate, redundant signal: even a reader still unsure of a line's exact position instantly recognises, from the notehead's shape alone, that they're dealing with a cymbal rather than a drum, before they've even identified which one. This redundancy between position and shape is a readability principle the convention reuses elsewhere — for the cross-stick detailed further on in this guide, for instance, which also borrows the cross while placing it on the snare line rather than above the staff.

The hi-hat and the ride sit in a neighbouring zone right at the top of the staff: the ride sits on the staff's top line itself, the fifth line, while the hi-hat played with the stick sits just above it, in the space just past that line — which can confuse a reader in a hurry. The distinction then comes as much from the rhythmic context — the hi-hat most often unspools a continuous subdivision, and the ride replaces it for that same role rather than adding to it, a division of roles the hub's guide on building a groove details in its own right — as from the exact position. That makes the legend at the head of the score, mentioned above, all the more useful whenever a score mixes the two voices in an unusual way.

Open, Closed and Foot Hi-Hat: the + and o Symbols

The hi-hat isn't limited to a single position on the staff: its sound changes radically depending on whether the two cymbals that make it up stay pressed together or spread apart, and the notation has to capture that difference without multiplying positions. The convention solves this with two small symbols placed above the cross-shaped notehead rather than with a new position. A plus sign (+) above the note indicates a closed hi-hat, the two cymbals pressed together at the moment of the strike, for a short, dry sound. An o above the note, conversely, indicates an open hi-hat, the two cymbals apart, left to vibrate and ring against each other for a longer, more diffuse sound. An o crossed with a small diagonal stroke signals an in-between position, the half-open hi-hat, less common but genuinely present in certain styles.

One detail saves a lot of ink and a lot of reading: these symbols don't repeat on every note. Once an o appears above a hi-hat note, every note that follows stays open until a new symbol — usually a + closing the hi-hat back up — changes the instruction. A whole pattern can therefore carry just a single o right at its start if the hi-hat stays open through to the end, which makes it all the more important to track the last symbol encountered before playing a note whose head carries no mark of its own.

The hi-hat can also be played entirely with the foot, with no stick ever touching the cymbal: the pedal closes and reopens the two cymbals against each other to produce a short, dry click, often called a foot chick. This foot stroke is written with its own cross-shaped notehead, but placed this time in the space just below the staff rather than above it: that position alone signals that it's the left foot rather than a stick strike, with no need for an extra + or o symbol, since a closed hi-hat played by foot is by far the most common case.

Stacking the Voices: Stem Direction Between Hands and Feet

A drum pattern almost always has several pieces of the kit sounding at the same instant: a kick drum hit often lands exactly under a hi-hat stroke, a snare accent can coincide with a crash cymbal. The staff then has to stack, on a single beat, several notes at different vertical positions — a situation classic melodic notation also runs into, but one drumming meets constantly rather than occasionally. The convention handles this vertical reading through stem direction, the line running from each notehead.

The most widely followed rule separates pieces played by hand from pieces played by foot: everything played with sticks (snare, toms, hi-hat, ride, crash) carries a stem pointing up; everything played by foot (kick drum and foot hi-hat) carries a stem pointing down, whatever its position on the staff. This split isn't just an arbitrary graphic convention: it shows, at a single glance, two independent rhythmic layers stacked on top of each other, the hands' and the feet's — exactly the kind of independence another hub guide details the building and acquisition of. On a single beat, a reader can therefore immediately spot what the feet are doing by looking for the down stems, and what the hands are doing by looking for the up stems, without having to sort the notes one by one by position.

When two notes played by hand land at exactly the same instant — the hi-hat and the snare on the same beat, say — they generally share one single vertical stem connecting their two noteheads at different heights: one stem, two noteheads at distinct positions along it, reads as two strictly simultaneous hits rather than one ambiguous note. This vertical reading, notehead by notehead along a shared stem, is what makes it possible to decipher a stack of three or four voices on a single beat without ever having to guess the order they land in: they all land at exactly the same instant, and only their respective vertical position tells you which piece is playing what.

This convention — up stems for the hands, down stems for the feet — is, again, a recommendation rather than a universal rule: some more recent drum notation, particularly in software and certain modern editions, chooses to point every stem upward for the sake of uniform visual readability, even at the cost of losing that instant distinction between hands and feet. A reader who comes across a score where the kick drum, too, carries an up stem isn't looking at a mistake, only at a different editorial convention — one more sign that the standardisation of this notation remains a widely followed recommendation rather than a single, absolute rule.

Subdivision on the Page: What Eighth-Note Beaming Shows

Another hub guide already explains what a beam changes between the flags of a group of eighth or sixteenth notes on a melodic staff: several separate flags join into one or two continuous horizontal bars without changing the duration of any note. On a drum staff, that same visual grouping fills a precise role, directly tied to what another hub guide calls subdivision, the underlying grid (eighth notes, triplets, sixteenth notes) a groove is built on: beaming into eighth or sixteenth notes shows that subdivision without a single word needing to name it.

A hi-hat pattern notated in eighth notes beamed two by two thus announces, before you've even heard a single note, a binary subdivision; the same pattern grouped into triplets — three eighth notes joined under one beam with the figure 3 above — announces a ternary subdivision, the one behind shuffle or swing. A reader who spots this grouping before playing the first note already knows, without needing it spelled out, which grid to lock every kick or snare hit placed between two hi-hat eighth notes onto.

Reading this grouping matters most as soon as a pattern places a note somewhere other than exactly on a full beat, which is the norm rather than the exception in a groove worth notating: a snare eighth note sitting between two hi-hat eighth notes isn't spotted by counting in the abstract, it's spotted by identifying its precise place inside the beamed group it belongs to — exactly as the hub guide on counting a bar for melodic notation points out, applied here to a rhythmic grid rather than a sequence of pitches.

Ghost Notes and Accents: Parentheses and Accent Marks on the Page

The dynamics of a groove — the volume gap between an almost inaudible hit and a clean accent, a mechanism already covered in its own right in the hub's guide on building a groove — also has to be written onto the staff, without needing any new position or new notehead. Two symbols are enough, placed directly on or around the note in question.

A ghost note is written by placing its notehead in parentheses, a pair of small curves bracketing the usual oval or cross without changing either its position or its shape. That parenthesis changes nothing about the note's duration or its place in the bar: a ghost note in parentheses occupies a rhythmic slot every bit as precise as an accented note, and must be counted exactly the same way in the bar's total beat count. It only carries a dynamic instruction — play this hit at a volume well below the notes around it, almost at the edge of audible — without removing it from the score or from the pulse.

An accent, conversely, is written with an accent mark, the > symbol, placed just above or just below the notehead depending on its position on the staff — a placement convention identical to the one used to mark an accent on any other instrument. The accent mark indicates a hit noticeably harder than its neighbours, without specifying an absolute volume: it's the contrast with the rest of the line, ghost notes included, that gives the accent its impact, not a volume value fixed in absolute terms.

These two symbols are almost always read together rather than in isolation, because they describe the two ends of the same dynamic scale: a snare pattern that alternates parentheses and accent marks across a single line of eighth or sixteenth notes shows, before you've even heard it, exactly where the groove's valleys and peaks sit — information the mere sequence of notes, without these two symbols, couldn't convey on its own.

Cross-Stick and Special Articulations: the Limits of Standardisation

Not every stroke on a drum kit fits as neatly into the position-plus-notehead convention detailed above. Cross-stick, also called rim click or side stick, is the most common example: it consists of laying the body of the stick flat across the snare head, butt end raised above the rim, and striking that rim with the butt rather than the tip of the stick, for a dry, woody sound very different from a normal snare hit.

The most widespread convention notates cross-stick with a cross-shaped notehead, the same one reserved for cymbals elsewhere on the staff, but placed this time directly on the snare's usual line or space rather than above the staff. Position — at the snare's level — combined with shape — the cross usually reserved for cymbals — is generally enough to signal unambiguously that this is a cross-stick and not a normal snare hit or a stray cymbal marking. It's one of the rare situations where the convention reuses the same graphic symbol, the cross, for two different meanings depending on its exact position on the staff: a cymbal above, a cross-stick at the snare's level.

This notation for cross-stick remains, more than most of the other symbols detailed in this guide, an area where uniformity between publishers stays imperfect: some scores prefer a diamond-shaped notehead, others add the explicit label x-stick or rim click above the first occurrence rather than relying on the graphic symbol alone, out of caution. That's precisely the kind of detail the legend at the head of the score, mentioned earlier in this guide, exists to clear up before the first bar: a cross-stick misread on first pass, mistaken for an ordinary snare accent, for instance, produces a sound radically different from the one the score intended, whereas a kick drum hit miscounted by a single beat is generally noticed much faster by ear.

Flams, Drags and Rolls: Ornaments and Rudimental Rolls

Three ornamental figures, also standardised by the Percussive Arts Society in its list of 40 International Rudiments adopted in 1984, round out the graphic vocabulary of a drum staff: the flam, the drag and the roll. The first two are written on a shared principle — one or more small grace notes (miniature notes, without a full stem or a rhythmic value of their own, attached to the main note by a small stroke) placed just before the note they ornament.

A flam is written with a single grace note before the main note: in execution, one hand strikes that small grace note a fraction of a second before the other hand strikes the main note, almost but not quite together, which produces a thicker, wider sound than a single hit, without ever becoming two clearly separate sounds to the ear. A drag, sometimes called a ruff, follows exactly the same principle with two grace notes instead of one, usually joined to each other by their own small beam: the two grace notes are played as a very fast double bounce of a single hand, just before the other hand strikes the main note.

A roll is notated differently, without separate grace notes: one or more diagonal bars cross directly through the main note's stem, a symbol called a tremolo, inherited from general melodic notation, where it already indicates a fast repetition of the same note. The number of bars specifies how dense the subdivision requested inside that note's value should be — one bar for a wider subdivision, two or three for an increasingly tight one — leaving it to the drummer to execute it by alternating hands or by double-bouncing, depending on context and whatever instruction often accompanies the score. A z laid across the stem, rather than straight bars, signals a special case: the buzz roll or press roll, where each hand produces not clean separate hits but several continuous bounces almost melting into one another, for a sound much denser and more continuous than a standard barred roll. In both cases, a tie often connects the head of the roll note to a second, identical notehead that closes out the figure, to signal that the roll must be held through to the end of the written value rather than released early.

These figures look similar enough on first read — one or two small notes versus bars on the stem — that mixing them up remains common for a still-inexperienced reader; the table above tells them apart from one another, alongside the other special symbols already detailed in this guide, to serve as a quick reference rather than a linear read.

Reading a Complete Pattern, Then Writing Your Own

All the conventions detailed above (position, notehead, articulation symbols, stem direction) only make full sense once applied together across a complete bar. The table below breaks down a generic example pattern, built purely to illustrate reading and with no reference to any specific song, over a four-beat bar subdivided into eighth notes, eight rhythmic positions in all.

This table reads column by column rather than row by row, to find what each hand or foot is doing at a given instant: on the first beat, the hi-hat and the kick drum land together, an up stem for the hi-hat and a down stem for the kick drum at that same instant, exactly the vertical reading detailed earlier in this guide. The ghost note sitting on the off-beat of the second beat occupies its own rhythmic slot just like any other note, even though it stays almost inaudible in execution: leaving it out would throw off the bar's count just as surely as leaving out a rest on a melodic staff would — a checking reflex already detailed for melodic notation in another hub guide, and one that applies here identically, beat-slot by beat-slot rather than beat by beat.

Writing down a pattern you're playing or hearing yourself, rather than deciphering one already printed, follows the reverse path of this reading process, but in a precise order that avoids as many errors as possible. The first decision concerns subdivision (eighth notes, triplets or sixteenth notes): it fixes the underlying grid before a single note is even placed, exactly as the hub's guide on building a groove points out for the musical choice that precedes this graphic decision. Once the grid is chosen, the next step is to place the most continuous voice, usually the hi-hat or the ride, on each of its positions along that grid: once it's down, it serves as the visual anchor for placing everything else.

Next comes the snare, most often on the beats that carry the backbeat already covered in its own right in the hub's guide on building a groove, followed by the kick drum, whose exact position is decided by listening to, or imagining, the bass line accompanying it. Ghost notes and accents are added last, once the rhythmic skeleton is in place, making sure each one occupies a precise slot on the grid rather than an approximate spot between two beats. One final check, taken directly from the method for counting a bar already detailed in the hub guide on the melodic staff, closes out the exercise: add up the value of every note and every rest in the bar, ghost notes included for their position but not for their duration since they add none to the total count, until it lands exactly on the expected beat total. A bar that doesn't add up flags a transcription error before the first run-through, exactly as on any other staff.

Common pitfalls to avoid

Explore in the Music Hub

More guides