Blank Drum Sheet Music You Can Print for Free
Blank drum sheet music is a five-line staff with a drum legend at the top and bar lines drawn in. What matters is not the paper but the template: how many bars fit on a line, whether the legend is printed, and whether the spacing lets you write sixteenths without crowding. Get those right and any sheet of paper works.
The short answer
A usable blank drum sheet has four bars per line, five to six lines per page, a printed legend at the top, and enough vertical space between staves to write accents and sticking underneath.
On A4 or Letter, that lands around 28 to 32 bars per page for standard 4/4. Fewer bars means more space and easier handwriting; more means a longer piece on fewer sheets. Four per line is the sweet spot for most people.
What makes a template usable
Four features, and most free downloads get at least one wrong.
A legend at the top. Space to write which line is which drum, and which notehead shape means what. Without it, every chart you write needs a verbal explanation, which defeats the point of writing it down.
Bar lines already drawn. Drawing bar lines by hand is the most tedious part of writing notation, and pre-ruled bars remove it entirely. Look for five lines divided into four equal bars across the width.
Room under the staff. Accents, sticking marks, dynamics and hi-hat foot notes all go below the stave. A template with no space under each line forces you to squeeze them in or leave them out.
Space at the top of each staff for the time signature and, on the first line, the clef position. Some templates omit this and you end up writing 4/4 in the margin.
::: callout
The counterintuitive part: wider spacing matters more than more staves. People print templates with eight staves per page to save paper, then discover that sixteenth-note passages are unwritable and the page is unusable for anything but simple grooves. Four generous lines beat eight cramped ones, and the paper saving never pays for the legibility loss.
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Printing on A4 versus Letter
Both work, and the difference is smaller than the fuss suggests.
A4 is 210 × 297 mm, slightly taller and narrower than Letter. It suits four bars per line with generous side margins, and it is the standard everywhere outside North America.
Letter is 216 × 279 mm, slightly wider and shorter. The extra width fits four bars comfortably; the reduced height means one fewer line per page if you keep the same spacing.
The practical settings that matter more than paper size: print at 100%, not "fit to page", because scaling distorts the staff spacing and makes the lines uneven. Use single-sided printing for anything you will write on, since ink bleeding through from the reverse makes the staff look doubled. And print a few pages at a time — a template you have not tested is a template you may not want fifty of.
If you print double-sided to save paper, use a heavier stock so the reverse does not show through.
Drawing your own
If you cannot find a template you like, drawing your own takes about ten minutes and gives you exactly the spacing you want.
One: draw five lines with a ruler, spacing them about 2 mm apart for handwriting. Tighter than that and your noteheads collide; wider wastes vertical room.
Two: draw a bar line every quarter of the page width, giving four bars per line. Sixteen bars on a page then divides neatly into four lines of four, which matches how most music is counted.
Three: leave about 12 mm between staves — enough for accents, sticking and dynamics underneath.
Four: at the top of the first line, leave a gap for the time signature and write your legend: which line is the snare, which is the kick, which is the hi-hat, and what each notehead means.
Five: photocopy the result rather than redrawing it. This is the step that turns a ten-minute job into a permanent template.
The legend is worth spending a minute on. Drum notation symbols has the full set to choose from, and how to write drum notation explains which decisions to make first.
What to avoid
Templates with no room under the staff. They look clean and are nearly unusable, because everything that is not a note has nowhere to go.
Heavily decorated manuscript paper. Borders, ornamental clefs and coloured backgrounds use ink, distract from the notes, and photocopy badly.
Templates designed for pitched music. A piano manuscript has a treble and bass clef and a brace, none of which you need, and its spacing is wrong for drums.
Very small staff sizes. If your noteheads will touch each other when you write sixteenths, the template is too dense. Print bigger and use more paper.
Loose sheets without a folder. Charts get lost. Three-hole punch them or keep them in a ring binder from the first day, or you will be reprinting.
How many bars per page you actually get
A quick reference for planning, assuming four bars per line:
| Bars per line | Lines per page | Bar total (A4) |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 6 | 18 |
| 4 | 5–6 | 20–24 |
| 4 (tight) | 6 | 24 |
| 5 | 5 | 25 |
| 6 | 5 | 30 |
For most writing, four bars per line and five or six lines per page is the practical answer. A three-minute song in 4/4 is around 100 bars, which is four or five pages — worth knowing before you start, because a long chart is easier to write when you have planned the page breaks.
If you are writing a chart for performance rather than a transcription, you will need far fewer bars. What a drum chart is explains the difference, and it is the format that fits comfortably on one or two sheets.
Where to get printable templates
Searching for "blank drum sheet music" or "blank drum manuscript" returns a large selection, most of it free, and quality varies in exactly the four ways described above. Check for a printed legend, pre-drawn bar lines, room under the staff and a time-signature gap before printing a whole pack.
Music-notation software will also print empty staves, which is useful if you want a specific bar count or a particular staff size — you set the layout once and print as many as you need.
::: verdict
Print four copies of one template and use them up before printing more. If you have not filled four pages, you do not yet know what spacing you actually want, and the pack of fifty you were about to print would have been the wrong one.
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Frequently asked questions
The questions readers send us most about blank drum sheet music.
Around 20 to 32 bars on A4 or Letter, depending on how large you write. Four bars per line with five or six lines per page is the practical middle, giving enough room for sixteenth notes and sticking marks without wasting paper. If your noteheads collide, use fewer bars per line.
Free templates are widely available from music-education sites and notation software vendors — search for "blank drum manuscript" or "blank drum staff paper". Check each one for a printed legend, pre-drawn bar lines and space under the staff, since those three features are what separate a usable template from a decoration.
Yes, and it takes about ten minutes. Draw five lines roughly 2 mm apart, add a bar line every quarter of the page width, leave 12 mm between staves, and reserve a gap for the time signature and legend on the first line. Then photocopy it so you never have to draw it again.
Single-sided for anything you will write on, because ink from the reverse can show through and make the staff lines look doubled, which is confusing to read. If you want to save paper, print double-sided but use heavier stock, or write in pencil rather than ink.
Only slightly. A4 and Letter both fit four bars per line comfortably; the difference is one line per page at most. What matters far more is printing at 100% rather than scaled to fit, since fitting distorts the staff spacing and makes lines uneven across the page.