Reading a drum grid

Drums can be written on a normal stave, and orchestral parts are. Almost nobody else bothers. Grooves are written on a grid, because a grid shows the one thing that matters on a kit: what lands at the same moment as what.

The layout

One row per drum, stacked with the cymbals at the top and the kick at the bottom, roughly matching how a kit sits in front of you. One column per sixteenth note, so sixteen columns make one bar of four four.

A filled square means strike. An empty one means leave it alone. That is the entire notation.

A worked example: Straight Rock

Play 90 bpm · 4 bars · 3 drums

Kick

Hi-Hat Closed

Snare

Loading the instrument… Each row is one drum, each column one sixteenth of a bar. Touch a filled square to hear that drum, or play the whole groove. Sound could not load. Try again

Read it downward, column by column. Column one has the kick and the hi-hat together, so both are struck at once. Column five has the snare and the hi-hat, which is the backbeat. Every other column is hi-hat alone, and the odd-numbered ones are empty, because this hi-hat is playing eighth notes rather than sixteenths.

The outlined columns are the four beats you would count out loud. Everything between them is a subdivision. Press Play and read along, or touch any filled square to hear that one drum on its own: the same kit the app uses, and the same grid the app writes a groove on.

Five more grooves, in the order a beginner course teaches them, are on the drum beats page.

Counting it out loud

Sixteen columns get counted one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a, three-e-and-a, four-e-and-a. It sounds silly and it works, which describes most rhythm teaching.

If a groove only uses eighth notes, drop the e and the a and count one-and-two-and. The hi-hat above does exactly that: eight strikes in the bar, landing on every number and every and, which is why half its columns are blank.

Why the backbeat is on two and four

In the example the snare hits on beats two and four, never on one and three. That displacement is what makes it sound like popular music rather than a march. A march puts its accent on one, and the difference in feel is enormous for a change that is purely about placement.

Nobody decided this by committee. It came up through American vernacular music over decades and then everything else copied it.

What the grid cannot show

Loudness, for one. A real hi-hat pattern is not sixteen identical taps, it is accented in a shape, and that shape is most of the groove. Grids sometimes add a mark for accents, and mostly they do not.

Nor can it show an open hi-hat, a rimshot, a ghost note played so quietly it is felt rather than heard, or where the drummer is sitting behind the beat on purpose. Those get written in words above the grid, if at all.

Which is the usual bargain with notation. A grid gets you the skeleton quickly and honestly, and the rest has to come off a recording.