If I find myself unable to get new articles out, I’ll often spend time revisiting old articles to touch them up, and sometimes take a peek at older transcriptions. It’s mainly to look at the engraving of my drum notation, just to see if I did anything particularly odd that week — I don’t have the time, energy, or desire to actually proofread them. Hopefully, I can keep transcriptions coming out to the point where it will not become practical to do this, so maybe I should knock it off… but sometimes I can’t help myself.

What I’ve been reflecting on lately is my generally unwavering approach to writing all parts of the drum set on the same rhythm, as opposed to using multiple, independent rhythms. For instance, here are three ways of writing the same groove:

You could think of it as using multiple “voices,” as most scorewriters call it (except for the late Finale, which calls them “layers”). 

I don’t know why I prefer option 1 so much. I think it comes from how I actually count and play the instrument — seeing the different elements directly interact and weave in and out of one another seems to help me the most with counting and coordination. This was also the style preferred by my drum teacher, as well as some of the books I went through at an early age, like A Funky Primer.

I also find the other options to generally be messy; the staff takes up more vertical space, incomplete/off-beat tuplets can easily become an eyesore, and you have to be very particular about positioning rests. As I’ve complained about in the past, MuseScore struggles to get rests neat and orderly, so it’s another thing to spend time on when notating music.

MuseScore also plays a little fast and loose with multiple voices, and you can rather haphazardly delete rests from voices 2–4, which leads to a major violation of engraving rules. If it weren’t for the perfect horizontal alignment of the computer, this would be unreadable:

Well… it’s still pretty much unreadable.

All that being said, option 2 seems to be the default for “professional” scores. My biggest exposure to that comes from drum charts, which I’m pretty picky about; note-for-note parts should be underwritten anyway, to the point where the exact engraving style should be irrelevant. I haven’t really bought a drum scorebook, and it seems modern drum set books won’t go through that kind of editing process and get re-engraved even if they get picked up by a publisher.

At the risk of painting myself as some sort of drum notation messiah, I’m not really hung up on what a perceived industry standard is — many drum scores are not written by drummers, and/or are left to the devices of a scorewriter’s defaults. I’ve spent plenty of time complaining about how that can become counterproductive. 

Option 3 is generally the least common; people either write drum parts as one unified thing or keep the hands and feet separate. But there are probably reasons to pick one over another. 

Todd Bishop had his own crisis of faith (so to speak) about using the same style that I do, and he put together a pretty fun chronology of major drum set books to see how drum notation has evolved. He started with Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, but you could go back further to Gene Krupa’s Drum Method from 1935, which kind of has something resembling modern drum set notation:

It’s basically option 3, with the cymbal part written separately from the rest of the kit.* This continued somewhat with Advanced Techniques, which has the jazz ride part on its own, over the kick and snare. It makes sense, with the book being all about playing different comping patterns under the unwavering cymbal beat. Unfortunately, Advanced Techniques does not use a standard five-line staff, and seems to have popularized the approach of writing each part of the kit on its own line using a grand staff from hell. 

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how the rhythmic style of this very old and well-known book has now fallen out of favor. By the mid-to-late 70s, most books were either writing everything together or keeping the hands and feet separate. That may have been inspired by Syncopation, which in turn may have been inspired by how certain orchestral scores would write concert snare drum and bass drum on the same staff but with separate rhythms.

Todd’s list ends with some Drumeo materials, which won’t get a great endorsement from either of us. It’s tough to identify a “modern classic” of a drum book from the 21st century. The best answer is probably the Groove Essentials books (for their popularity if nothing else), which actually uses all three styles, most often 3, then 2, and then 1.

Some of the drummers I’ve written about have transcribed their own playing — guys like David Garibaldi and Matt Gartska use one voice, while Chris Allison and Shawn Crowder use two.

The obvious reason to split up different parts of the kit is when they are playing disparate rhythms, like what we see with Advanced Techniques. It’s also usually the best way for certain polyrhythms. You can try to subdivide, but for whacky stuff like that Dennis Chambers performance I tackled a while back, multiple voices are the only way. 

However, most engravers seem to be following the “just because” principle, i.e., the cymbal and snare go together because that’s just how drum notation works. But unless the snare is simply slamming 2 & 4, concluding that the cymbal and snare parts are inherently connected, and are separated from the kick, for no reason other than that they are both played with the hands, is not helpful.

For one, the cymbal and the kick drum often line up anyway, so for 8th note-based grooves, using multiple voices is pretty redundant:

It’s equal parts hilarious and infuriating to see stuff like this:

My biggest consideration comes from when I think multiple voices obfuscate a part of the kit that’s simply playing a repetitive rhythm, for example, the blast beat finale of the “Flashback” drum solo. Here’s how I originally wrote it:

Here’s it with the kick on its own voice:

I think it’s a little clearer. Seeing all of the stems from the kick climbing upwards to the cymbals is certainly intense, and with two voices it’s very obvious when the hands start playing a repeated dotted 8th rhythm:

Something similar happens with some of the jazz tunes I’ve done that have the drummer stomping out quarter notes, like with Joe Morello:

Of course, for that score, I did simply write “Con. Kick Sim.,” which I have misgivings about. While it can save space and make a score feel less redundant, it doesn’t take much effort to include the notes. 

Keith Moon presents an interesting situation. His timekeeping is easy enough to understand with one voice, but it’s common for Keith to keep kick drum 8ths going on under syncopated playing from the hands. Consider “Behind Blues Eyes,” which I originally did with all drums on the same rhythm:

Ignoring the fact that I squeezed too many bars onto each line, the fills look a bit cluttered. With the kick drum written separately:

It certainly helps on some beats, but it feels overcomplicated for when the kick is not playing steady 8ths, or, as you can see in the following, when there are stabs with the kick, snare, and cymbal, as well as a simple linear bucket fill:

To cut down on the potential mess of rests, I used as many long note lengths as possible, including dotted notes and quarter notes on offbeats. But since note length isn’t really relevant on the drums, many drummers would rather read rests instead.

Keeping time on the kick under fills isn’t a hip item these days; unless you’re hauling ass on the double kick, most drummers won’t use their feet when they fill, outside of linear stuff. 

On the topic of blast beats, “115,” similar to “Flashback,” looks a little heavy:

When split up:

Something that you need to be wary of is constantly switching between different styles, which can get disorienting, and there’s nothing else throughout “115” that calls for different voices. The chorus could be written with option 3, but it doesn’t offer obvious advantages in clarity for me:

“Get It Like That” had one serious moment of blast beating throughout my score:†

Separating the kick for two measures could hurt as much as it helps: 

A potential issue occurs anytime the snare and cymbal are on the same voice comes from writing an articulation for one drum that shares a stem with another. Consider which drum is supposed to be accented:

My usual system is that, for grooves, non-ghosted snares notes are full volume backbeats, while accents apply to the cymbal only. This does rob the kick and snare of three articulations (ghosted, normal, accented), but for timekeeping, I haven’t really heard situations where the drummer is having that much dynamic fun with their backbeats. The kick works approximately the same way.

David Garibaldi just writes snare accents under the snare notehead, on top of the staff:

It’s a little messy, and since I can’t find any normal snare notes throughout the grooves, it seems a little redundant. While keeping the kick and snare together can make this a little clearer, writing an accent on kick, snare, and cymbal all at once will look ugly no matter how you do it:

David had to get a little creative for such moments:

Something similar happens when the snare is playing a drag or buzz stroke on the same beat as a cymbal hit, such as with “Obverse I”:

While there’s ambiguity since the Z runs through the same stem as the snare and hi-hat, most drummers will know that the snare note is the buzzed note. Still, it is clearer separating the snare from the cymbal:‡

It’s worth checking out other parts of this tune that would work with multiple voices. The main 5/4 grooves have too many unison kick and cymbal notes to feel like splitting them up is helpful in any way:

The middle building sections are a bit different. Using two voices kind of works when the cymbal is just playing quarters: 

But when we get to the dotted 8th rhythms (especially the polymetric one that stretches over the barline), things look messy:

While it’s nice to clearly identify what the cymbal is playing, I think the total experience of trying to read and play this is worse — unlike “Flashback,” this doesn’t work as well with an equally syncopated kick and cymbal part. Fills with option 3 are also ugly, with rests hanging out above the staff:

“Obverse I” provides a good synopsis of why this can be such a headache. Throughout a performance, you will find different moments where the kick and cymbal are clearly in unison, or the cymbal is an isolated part, the kick is an isolated part, or the entire drumset is clearly together. Stressing out over the best way to notate every last moment can become counterproductive.

I remain under the conclusion that my using one voice is the best default — it saves the most space both in terms of height and unnecessary rests, and makes counting the clearest. I don’t think a piano part needs to have multiple rhythms if a melody is harmonized with the occasional dyad. As Todd wrote in his article, “the drum set is one instrument, what we play on it is one rhythm, using four limbs.”

But, I might use another style, and so with this article, I no longer feel a need to constantly explain myself. I just need to transcribe some more music…

* ^ The copy of Gene Krupa’s Drum Method that I have is technically a revised edition, but this engraving is likely how the book originally looked. I don’t know why someone would change it to this.

† ^ Matt Garstka’s transcriptions use a special rimshot notehead for snare backbeats, which presents its own options for flexibility, but is also a bit strange to look at.

‡ ^ The reason why the ghost notes look wonky is that the latest MuseScore update screwed up ghost notes, and I have yet to settle on a fix.