DRUM KIT NOTATION

where every drum and cymbal sits on the staff — per the Percussive Arts Society standard

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: music · beginners · reference · music room

Positions, note heads and marks: Norman Weinberg, “Guidelines for Drumset Notation”, Percussive Notes, June 1994 (Percussive Arts Society); expanded in the official PAS guide of 2002. The clef is neutral (percussion): a staff position names an instrument, not a pitch. Tom positions follow Ex. 4 of the standard. Checked 2026-08-13.

THE STANDARD WAS COUNTED, NOT DECREED

Norman Weinberg surveyed 220 published drumset works and gave each instrument the position most of them already used: the snare sat on the third space in 86 % of precisely notated works and 97 % of charts, the bass drum on the first space in 70 % and 97 %.

That is why charts printed before the standard still read with this same key: it described the practice rather than rewriting it.

On the sheet

Positions, note heads and marks: Norman Weinberg, “Guidelines for Drumset Notation”, Percussive Notes, June 1994 (Percussive Arts Society); expanded in the official PAS guide of 2002. The clef is neutral (percussion): a staff position names an instrument, not a pitch. Tom positions follow Ex. 4 of the standard. Checked 2026-08-13.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 10 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

DRUM KIT NOTATION

THE STANDARD WAS COUNTED, NOT DECREED

On the sheet

Printing

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