Drum Notation Symbols: Every Symbol Explained

There is no long list to memorise. A working drummer meets roughly a dozen symbols in a normal year, and most charts use fewer than ten. Learn them in four groups — where the note sits, what the notehead looks like, how long it lasts, and how the page repeats — and the list stops being intimidating.

The short answer

Drum notation symbols fall into four groups, and every symbol you will meet belongs to one of them.

Position tells you which drum or cymbal. Notehead shape tells you how to strike it. Note value tells you when and for how long. Road-map symbols tell you where to repeat, skip or jump.

If you cannot identify a symbol, ask which of those four questions it answers. That usually narrows it down to two candidates immediately.

Group one: where the note sits

The staff is a fixed vertical map of the kit. Counting lines and spaces from the bottom:

| Position | Piece |

|---|---|

| Bottom space | Bass drum |

| First line | Bass drum (variant, common in older charts) |

| Second space | Floor tom |

| Third line | Snare drum (variant) |

| Third space | Snare drum |

| Fourth space | Rack toms — higher tom, higher position |

| Top line | Ride cymbal |

| Above top line | Crash cymbal |

| Top space | Hi-hat |

Two conventions are worth flagging. Toms are stacked, not fixed: a two-tom setup may put the high tom in the fourth space and the low tom on the fourth line, so read the legend rather than assuming. And hi-hat sometimes moves to the very top line while the ride drops below it — the two swap places between publishers more than any other pair.

Group two: notehead shapes

This is the group that causes the most confusion, because drum notation reuses shapes that mean something different on melodic staves.

| Symbol | Meaning |

|---|---|

| Solid dot | Strike the drum normally |

| Hollow dot | Play open, or a cymbal struck and left to ring |

| X | Any cymbal — hi-hat, ride or crash |

| X with a small circle above it | Open hi-hat |

| X on the ride, with a diamond or a dot | Ride bell |

| Note in parentheses | Optional, or a quiet grace note |

| Small note with a slash on the stem | Flam, drag or buzz roll |

The open hi-hat circle is the one beginners miss most often, because it sits above the note rather than on it and is drawn small. If a chart sounds wrong when you read it literally, a missed open-hi-hat circle is a common reason.

Group three: how long it lasts

Duration notation for drums is identical to any other instrument, which is good news — if you already read rhythm, this group is free.

| Symbol | Value in 4/4 |

|---|---|

| Hollow notehead, no stem | Whole note — four beats |

| Hollow notehead with stem | Half note — two beats |

| Solid notehead with stem | Quarter note — one beat |

| One beam or flag | Eighth note — half a beat |

| Two beams | Sixteenth note — quarter of a beat |

| Three beams | Thirty-second note — rare on drums |

| Dot after a note | Add half the note's value |

| Tie or slur between two notes | Hold through both |

| Squiggly rest | Silence for that value |

One drum-specific habit: rests are frequently omitted in the drum voice your ears are following. A kick part with gaps is often written with nothing at all in those positions rather than with rests, because drummers read the vertical stack of simultaneous hits rather than each voice in isolation. Do not read an empty space as "play nothing" without checking the other voices.

Group four: repeats and road-map symbols

These appear in longer charts and song transcriptions, and they save the arranger from writing the same bar out twenty times.

| Symbol | Meaning |

|---|---|

| Double bar line with two dots | Repeat the section |

| Segno (an S with a line and dots) | Jump back here on D.S. |

| Coda (a crosshair circle) | Jump forward to the coda on "to coda" |

| D.C. | Go back to the start |

| D.S. | Go back to the segno |

| Fine | Stop here |

| Repeat count (x3, x4) | Play the bar that many times |

| Simile mark (a slash with dots) | Keep the previous bar going |

For drums specifically, the simile mark and the repeat count do most of the heavy lifting. Grooves repeat for pages at a time, so a chart that looks long is often three bars of actual content and a repeat instruction.

The symbols you will actually meet every week

If you learn nothing else, these are worth recognising on sight: the solid notehead, the x, the hollow notehead, the open-hi-hat circle, the beam, the repeat bar line and the bracket.

That set covers the overwhelming majority of a pop, rock, funk or country chart. Everything else — bell indications, brush swirls, hi-hat foot splashes, cross-stick notation — is worth learning when you meet it, in the context of a piece you actually want to play.

::: callout

The counterintuitive part: adding symbols is easy, and chart software will happily let an arranger write an unplayable page. A dense chart is not a more complete chart. Published drum transcriptions for beginners deliberately leave things out, and the omissions are editorial, not sloppy.

:::

Symbols that look alike and are not

Three pairs account for almost every reading error.

Flam vs drag. A flam is one grace note before the main hit, drawn as a single small note with a slash. A drag is two grace notes, and is sometimes drawn with two slashes or two small notes. They sound related but the sticking differs, and a drag played as a flam lands noticeably early.

Open hi-hat vs a struck open cymbal. Both use a hollow or open indication, but the open-hi-hat circle sits above the x on the top line, while an open crash is a hollow notehead higher up the staff. Playing the hi-hat closed where the chart says open flattens the groove.

Cross-stick vs a normal snare hit. Cross-stick is usually written as a small x on the snare line, which is easy to mistake for a cymbal indication at speed. If a snare x appears inside the staff rather than at the top, check whether it means cross-stick.

::: verdict

Keep a one-page cheat sheet of the seven common symbols and nothing else. A reference that has everything on it stops being readable at speed, which defeats the purpose. Add a symbol to the sheet only after you have been tripped up by it twice.

:::

How to actually use a reference page

Do not sit and memorise tables. Read a real chart, hit something you do not recognise, and look it up. Symbols learned in the middle of a bar you are trying to play stick far better than symbols learned from a list, and you will cover the whole table within a month of regular reading without ever feeling like you studied.

If you are writing notation rather than reading it, the same table runs in reverse, and how to write drum notation covers the practical side. For the counting that sits underneath every symbol, see how to count drum notation.