My drum students constantly complain about the dearth of good readable drum charts on the internet. Like my guitar students, they want to be able to find the sheet music for their favorite songs and learn them “on their own.” While there are some decent guitar charts available, drummers, for the most part, are left out. Let’s explore creating a battery tab to find out why this issue exists.
What are battery tabs?
Drum tab (tab) is a kind of abbreviated sheet music for drummers. Drum Tab for the Internet is usually written in “acsii text”. Part of the reason this format is so widely used is that it saves the author the time and money of creating it in a music notation software program. This means that it can be offered for free to drummers looking for tabs.
How drum tabs are written
For the most part, the programs that are available for writing drum tabs are inherently flawed. They do not provide an easy to read means of noting the beat. If you look at an acsii drum tab, you’ll notice that the beat is indicated by little dashes that represent sixteenth notes. A drummer could go blind just trying to count them! When you add to this the fact that the vast majority of drum tabs on the internet are written by hobbyists who may have trouble notating the beat accurately, you are left with some real problems for the drummer trying to learn a song from the drums. tabulation.
Where to find good battery tabs
If you want easy-to-read, accurate drum tabs, you should look for tabs created with legitimate music notation software. There are several good software programs available. Among these are “Guitar Pro” and “G7” (by Sebelius). Although these are primarily guitar software programs, both can be used to write great drum tabs. These tabs are written in traditional drum notation and are extremely easy to read. Once you experience these tabs, you’ll never want to go back to the confusing and hard-to-read tabs you find for free on the internet!
If you’d like to see an example of these tabs, you can find a free tab I wrote with Guitar Pro here: www.may-studio-music-lessons.com/drum-tabs.html
If you are interested in purchasing one of these programs, you can find them here: www.may-studio-music-lessons.com/guitar-music-software.html
You’ll also find more information on the page about quality drum tabs. Have fun with these tabs, they will change the way you play!