Drum tablature, or tab, is a simplified form of musical notation.
While tabs follow the rules of standard notation, you should know that they can never replace it.
They are in many ways incomplete.
Of course, this doesn't mean they are not helpful, they are, but if drumming is something you are really serious about, then you should learn how to read standard notation as well.
Drum tabs are instructions on how to play a specific song.
They are made of lines, letters, and symbols.
To a novice they may seem a bit confusing, but once you understand what all the stuff means, it's actually quite simple.
This is how a tab looks like: S|--oo--o-|.
As you can see, this is only one line.
Because one line represents only one instrument on your drum kit, you can imagine that tabs always come with more lines.
What does it mean? As you can see, it starts with a letter S.
The letter S means it represents a snare drum.
Every line starts with an abbreviation which tells you which part of the drumset will be used.
S or SD is for a snare drum.
Other common abbreviations are: B or BD for bass drum, HH for hi-hats, CC for crash cymbal, and so on.
Abbreviations can vary from tab to tab.
Next we have vertical lines, dashes, and circles.
The vertical lines are used to separate measures.
Dashes indicate timing.
Each dash gets one count.
A little circle indicates how you hit the drum.
For example, o means a normal hit, O is an accent, g means ghost note, f means flam, d means Drag, and so on.
If you want to learn how to read tabs, you have to learn what all this and many other symbols stand for.
Ok, let's take a final look at our one line tab.
It tells us to hit a snare drum on count 3, 4, and 7.
That's it.
Of course, in reality tabs are much more complex, but these are the basics.