Percussion Guide: How to Read Percussion Music

Instead of playing notes through the passage of air through an instrument—like with woodwinds or brass—percussion instruments are played by striking or moving an instrument to produce sound. Percussion instruments include the various types of drums—like a snare, timpani, bongos, or djembe—and small wood or metal instruments—like cymbals, triangle, cowbell, woodblock, or tambourine.

Some percussion instruments can be played simply with the hands, while others require beaters such as drumsticks, mallets, or wire brushes to make the desired sound. Reading percussion music starts with the fundamentals of music theory, like clef notation, time signatures, and rhythmic notation.

The percussion family of musical instruments consists of two primary categories, which are membranophones and idiophones. Some percussion set-ups, like the drum set, fuse membranophones and idiophones into one apparatus. Here is a little more about membranophones and idiophones.

• Membranophones: Membranophones are instruments that have a tightly stretched membrane over a frame that is often made of metal or wood. This category includes timpani, bass drum, snare drum, headed-tambourine, tablas, bongos, congas, timbales, djembe, and any instrument that contains a drum head.
• Idiophones: An idiophone produces sound when the entire instrument vibrates. The instrument can vibrate because it is struck with a beater, or because it is shaken or moved. Some idiophones are wood instruments like cajón, woodblock, marimba, xylophone, maracas, castanets, and clave. Others are made of metal like chimes, crash cymbals, hi-hat, vibraphone, glockenspiel, steel drums, and cowbell.

Here are a few tips for learning to read percussion music.

1. Learn how to read natural clef. Pitched percussion—for instruments like timpani, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, or glockenspiel—is typically written in treble clef or bass clef. Drum set notation uses the natural clef—also called the percussion clef—which is denoted by two vertical lines next to the time signature. In the natural clef, specific spaces are assigned for the bass drum, snare drum, floor tom, and rack toms (hi tom and low tom). Cymbals, including hi-hat, ride cymbal, splash cymbals, and crash cymbals are indicated with "x" shaped noteheads. Note stems point downward to indicate that they are to be played with your feet—like with the kick drum—and stems point upward when notes are played using handheld beaters. In most cases, the basic drum notes appear on the staff as follows:

2. Learn the rhythm duration of various notes. The key rhythmic durations in drum music are the whole note, the half note, the quarter note, the eighth note, and the sixteenth note. Each of these notes sounds for one-half the duration of the note before it. For instance, a half note is one-half the duration of a whole note, the quarter note is one-half the duration of a half note, and so forth. They are notated as follows.

3. Memorize the time signatures. Time signatures are two vertically stacked numbers located to the right of your staff’s clef which indicate the timing of your music. The top number in a time signature indicates the number of beats in a measure, and the bottom number shows the duration of each note in a measure. For example, if the time signature on your music is in 3/4 time there are three beats per measure, and each beat has the duration of a quarter-note. The most frequently used time signature in western music is 4/4, which indicates four quarter-notes per measure. Because of this frequent use, 4/4 is often called “common time” and is sometimes indicated with a “c.”

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