DRUM SONGS

Jazz and blues drum songs

Thousands of charts, 38 to 282 BPM, averaging 114. Each one is read from a real score: play it along to the record, take it down to any tempo, or work through the course underneath it.

MOST PLAYED

TEMPO
38-282 BPM
AVERAGE
114 BPM
MOSTLY
BEGINNER

MOST PLAYED FIRST

The whole shelf, where you can narrow it further or sort it easiest first.

ABOUT JAZZ AND BLUES DRUM SONGS

Here the beat is split in three rather than in two, and the time is kept on the ride rather than the hi-hat. That is a different motion in your hands, not a different speed: somebody who plays straight eighths cleanly cannot necessarily swing. These charts are written as they were played, triplets and all.

Beginner, intermediate and advanced parts are all here on the source catalogue's own difficulty tiers, with beginner the largest of them. Most of the shelf has not been through that ranking at all, which is true of two thirds of this catalogue and is why the difficulty filter is something you turn on rather than something applied for you. Tens of hours of playing at the tempos written, all told.

A good place to start is "Tin Pan Alley (AKA Roughest Place In Town)" at 38 BPM, the slowest of the jazz and blues songs on this shelf, or "Glory Box (Solo)" at 11 bars, the shortest. Every chart here downloads as sheet music, tab, MIDI and MusicXML if you would rather read it away from the screen.

QUESTIONS

What is the difference between swing and straight?

Where the note between the beats falls. Straight splits the beat in two, so the off-beat sits exactly halfway; swing splits it in three and puts the off-beat two thirds of the way along, which is what makes it lope. Nothing else about the pattern changes, and everything about how it feels does.

Can I learn jazz drumming from a chart?

You can learn the part from a chart. What a chart cannot give you is how far behind the beat to sit, and that comes from playing along with the record -- which is what every page here does, the score scrolling against the recording it was taken from.

How fast are jazz and blues drum songs?

From 38 to 282 BPM, averaging 114. That number is where the record sits, not where you have to play it: every chart here runs at any tempo from a quarter of the written one upwards, with the recording following where it can.

What is the slowest and the fastest of them?

"Tin Pan Alley (AKA Roughest Place In Town)" by Stevie Ray Vaughan at 38 BPM is the slowest, and "Caravan." by John Wasson at 282 BPM is the quickest. Neither number is a wall: every chart here plays at any tempo from a quarter of the written one upwards, so the fast ones are learnable at the speed of the slow ones.

Which one is quickest to learn?

"Glory Box (Solo)" by Portishead is the shortest part on this shelf at 11 bars. Short is not the same as easy, but a short part is one you can get all the way through in a sitting, and playing something end to end teaches more than looping the first eight bars of something longer.

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