Beats on the drums

Why a beat is not a tune

Every other instrument on this site plays a melody by matching pitches: the note moves up or down until it lands on a tine, a bar, a string. A drum has no pitch to match. What looks like a note number on a kit is not a note at all - it is which drum. Thirty-six is the kick, thirty-eight the snare, forty-two the closed hi-hat.

So the one operation every other instrument depends on is forbidden here. Transpose a melody and you change its key; transpose a beat and the kick becomes a snare. The kit plays its grooves exactly as written or not at all, and it never borrows a tune from the melody catalogue - a piano must never be handed a kick drum, and a kit must never be handed Twinkle.

The other difference is that on a kit, more than one thing lands at the same instant. A melody is one note after another; a beat is a hi-hat and a snare striking together on two and four. That is why it is written as a grid - a row per drum, a column per sixteenth - and not as a line.

The order they come in

One limb at a time, then two, then three, then a fill. That order is Drumeo's beginner sequence, not one invented here: hands alternating first, then the hi-hat keeping time under a backbeat, then the kick underneath, then everything together. The tempos stay between 84 and 92, because every beginner course starts under a hundred.

Basic grooves like these are generic rhythms - nobody's composition - so there is nothing to license and nothing to credit.

What the kit can sound

12 pads, the same General MIDI numbers the app sends: kick, snare, two hi-hats, three toms, ride, two crashes, cowbell and clap. The six beats above use 5 of them - a beginner course does not need the whole kit, and a fill sounds better on three drums played well than on eleven played late.

Play the kit in your browser →

The melody catalogue, on the other instruments

One song list, eight instruments, and every one of them meets it differently.