DRUM SONGS

Shuffle and triplet drum songs

Thousands of charts, 38 to 380 BPM, averaging 131. 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
38-380 BPM
AVERAGE
131 BPM
MOSTLY
INTERMEDIATE

MOST PLAYED FIRST

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

ABOUT SHUFFLE AND TRIPLET DRUM SONGS

A shuffle splits every beat into three instead of two. That one change is the difference between rock and blues, and between two genuinely different motions in your hands -- it is why a drummer with clean straight eighths can still sound wrong playing a shuffle. These are the songs on this shelf written in triplets, found by reading the notes rather than by trusting a genre tag.

Beginner, intermediate and advanced parts are all here on the source catalogue's own difficulty tiers, with intermediate 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. Hundreds 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 shuffles on this shelf, or "M.Y" at 10 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 a shuffle on drums?

A groove where the beat divides in three and the middle note is left out, so what you play is the first and last of each triplet. It lopes rather than marches. Blues, a lot of early rock and roll, and most of what people call a swing feel are shuffles.

How do I know if a song is a shuffle?

Count the space between the beat and the note before the next one. If it sits exactly halfway it is straight; if it sits closer to the next beat, it is a shuffle. On this site you do not have to guess -- each chart was read note by note, and the songs on this shelf are the ones actually written in triplets.

How fast are shuffle and triplet drum songs?

From 38 to 380 BPM, averaging 131. 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 "Liminal Cypher" by Arch at 380 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?

"M.Y" by Betraying Lizard is the shortest part on this shelf at 10 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.

BY FEEL AND KIT

Songs for a small kit