As a follow-up to our post on How to Read a Guitar Tab that Uses ASCII Text, today we’re featuring a guest post by one of our very own MXTabs.net members – he goes by the username pie21 – to explain how to decipher a drum tab. Pie21 is a moderator over at the MXTabs.net Forum and is one of the leading contributers of drum tab to the MXTabs.net tab database. Take it away, pie21!

Reading ASCII Drum Tabs

The original motivation for tablature was to transcribe guitar and bass guitar sheet music to a simple format. However, while guitar tabs remain the most prominent, drummers have since started writing their own tabs, mainly because of the simplicity they afford.

This here is a brief introduction to the most fundamental skills of interpreting a drum tab, and by the end you should be well on your way to grooving in John Bonham’s legendary footsteps to the timeless classic Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin!

Reading a Drum Tab: The Basics

The main difference between guitar and drum tabs is that while a line of guitar tab is made to resemble the neck of a guitar (with each line corresponding to a string), drum tab is more like simplified sheet music, where each line represents a different drum (or cymbal, or whatever).

Guitar tabs generally don’t worry too much about how long their bars are, or how many hyphens (-) are between each note – figuring our the rhythm of the song is left as an exercise to the reader. However, drummers are concerned primarily with rhythm, so each character in a drum tab represents an exact unit of time. The most common drum tab format is for each character to represent a 16th note (semiquaver), so a bar of 4/4 would be comprised of 16 characters.

But what do the characters mean? While there are many ways to play a single string on a guitar, there are relatively few ways to play a single drum. Let’s briefly make the very naive assumption that there is only one way to play each drum. In this case, each character in a drum tab represents an instruction to either play or not play the drum. For actual drums, a note (instruction to play) is represented by an ‘o’ while a note on a cymbal is an ‘x’. These characters come from the conventional drum sheet music notation, where drum notes have normal, round heads and cymbal notes have an ‘x’ for a head.

With this knowledge, we can interpret the first two bars of groove (starting at 4:19) in one these Drum Tabs of Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, with the count included below to illustrate the integration of the rhythm in the tab:

CC|x---------------|----------------|
HH|--x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
SD|----o-------o---|----o-------o---|
BD|o-------o-------|o-------o-o---o-|
--|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|

The easiest way to read drum tab is to simply think of it as drum sheet music without stems coming from the notes, where every note is the length of a semiquaver and a hyphen represents a rest. As tabs lack the staff of sheet music, the 2-letter labels on the left describe which drum the line refers to. There are many, many variations our there and everyone will have their own preference, but the XX| format seems the most consistent.

The above pattern is one of the simplest to play, and one of the first any drummer will pick up. You simply play the snare on the 2 and 4 count, the bass drum on the 1 and 3 (with a couple of extra notes at the end), and a hi-hat on every 8th note, except the first (which is a crash).

Reading a Drum Tab: The Subtleties

Remember that assumption we made that each drum can only be played in one way? That’s rubbish, forget it. Despite a drum set’s lack of pitch, each and every drum and cymbal possesses a range of expressions, and there is at least 5 different ways to hit each one. You will very likely encounter these non-standard ways of hitting drums in any song you try to play, so they require their own character representations for the drum tab to be accurate.

The common symbols for drums:
o = normal hit
g = ghost note (played very softly)
O = accented hit (often omitted under the assumption that o is loud and g is soft, leaving specifics up to the reader)
f = flam (played with both hands almost simultaneously)
d = double, or diddle (2 notes played in rapid succession, each half as long as a single unit of tab)
z = buzz roll (let the stick bounce on the head)
x = cross stick (palm on the drum head, stick hitting the rim)

And for the cymbals:
x = normal hit
X = accented hit (played harder with the shoulder of the stick for hi-hats and crashes)
b = bell (sometimes X is simply used for the ride)
o = open hi-hats (play as the left foot is lifted)
# = close hi-hats (by lowering the left foot

A few of these symbols (the very common X, g, and f) are used in the following 12 bars (6:49-7:17, note the repeat meaning “play 5 times”) to add more texture to the music than the previous example:

--/----------------x5---------------\
HH|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|--------------#-|
SD|----o-------o---|--o--o-go--o-gog|----o-------o---|f--f--f--f--oooo|
BD|o-o----oo-o----o|o--o--o--o--o---|o-o----oo-o----o|-oo-oo-oo-oo----|
--|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|


In addition to various characters, there are many situations where special markup is required (e.g. tuplets, repeats, time signature changes), all of which have different implementations depending on who you ask. For more details and discussion of these issues, take a gander at the MXTabs.net Community’s attempt to develop a standard drum tab notation,

Hopefully this post has given you the insight to get out there and try out a few MXTabs.net drum tabs. If you’ve got any questions or opinions and drum tab, post away over at Tab Central!