Where is my mind drum tab

That's what I do too, actually. Note for note transcriptions don't seem to make as much sense when it comes to rock drumming, really. Nonetheless, they helped me figure out what I was hearing when I first started. Think they're good for that. And for anyone that really wants to get into the music.

Hope so too. And btw, the initial drum tabs are up if anyone's curious. Couldn't find 'em. I'm curious, what does drum tab look like? Like guitar tab, but with x's and o's where the numbers are. And oftentimes on fewer lines. Where the fuck are the theremin tabs? Har de har. Thanks for the direct link, Bryson, though I can't seem to find the drum tabs when browsing your site.

Music notation for drums is somewhat unique because the drums are what's called "unpitched" percussion. Whereas the notes for pitched instruments correspond to a note letter, such as a C, D, or F, notes in drum sheet music represent specific parts of the drum set e.

For a long time, music publishers considered drum sheet music to be undesirable to drummers, believing that a drum part needed to reflect only the general feel of the song and provided only a basic supportive role. Therefore, the creation of note-for-note drum sheet music was neglected.

However, drummers really are interested in learning to play like their favorite drummers and reproducing the classic drum parts of the past and today. There is no significant difference in the difficulty level of reading drum tab or just reading actual drum notation.

The rhythm above was basically the simplest drum beat we could have, and already the tab looks quite messy. And another thing to bear in mind is that this tab was written in a program that perfectly aligns the columns. Attempt to do it on a standard word processor and your results usually end up looking more like this:. Watch what happens:. We have to add a whole new line of tab to the entire score just to mark in one cymbal hit.

The crash cymbal is represented by the dark black X on the first line above the top line A in the treble clef. Because of where I have to put those lines in tab, the relationship between the bass-snare-bass-snare heartbeat of the rhythm has been obscured.

In notation, the high tom sits just down from the snare drum, on the middle line B in treble clef , and the low tom sits in the space just below that A in treble clef. No one, apart from other drummers, knows what drum tab means. Drum tab is a bit like learning a language that only a few other people speak, when instead you could invest the same amount of time and learn the one everybody is already speaking. Both languages are equally hard or easy to speak when it comes to drums, and, unlike guitar, drum tab offers no significant shortcuts or advantages.

The only thing I can think to say in its defence is that in the early days of the internet, bandwidth was at a premium, and a tab written in ASCII computer characters was a much smaller file than a PDF or JPG of written music notation.

This made tab files much easier to share around and archive in the past. In this respect, drum tab did a good job of mimicking sheet music well enough to get across what to play. However the internet of today has no problem handling large documents and images, and a sheet of music is a very small file. So, drummers: instead of spending time getting good at reading tab, why not invest a tiny bit more effort and learn how to read and write rhythms as they actually are and as they have been written down for centuries?

I help aspiring players unlock their natural talent and reach their musical goals through no-BS articles, videos, and online lessons. Christy Bannerman. Guitarist, Musician and Teacher. Home Blog Contact Menu. Why Drum Tab is pointless and why drummers should learn music notation.