Breakfast Rhythms – Learning to read and play drum fills and snare rhythms

Breakfast rhythms are great for all primary school ages, and they can be fun for high school and adult ages too to help with the initial barrier of learning the rhythms. By saying the rhythm and seeing it at the same time, you will be associating the sound with how it looks on paper, so eventually you will know that two 16th notes and an 8th note sounds like the word “sausages”, so in the future you may not think of the word sausages but you will know how the rhythm goes instantly when you see them combined on the sheet music.

This sheet is an accompaniment for a book I have made called “First Drum Book – Easy Reading Beats & Fills” (it’s a premium download). This page is not in the book yet but I’m currently going through the book again to improve parts of it. If you download the book now, you’ll get a notification to download the latest version for free when it’s ready.

This sheet will also be very helpful for any of the free snare drum exercises or snare drum sheet music I have posted and also for any of the beats and fills exercises, for help with reading the drum fills.

Free Downloads

Breakfast Rhythms (PDF)

10 breakfast snare drum exercises – phonetic rhythms

Here we are going to use 5 breakfast rhythms in various combinations to make up the 10 exercises for the snare drum. We use the words phonetically to help play the rhythms.

  • TEA (One quarter note
  • COFFEE (Two 8th notes)
  • SAUSAGES (Two 16th notes and an 8th note)
  • EGG&BACON (Four 16th notes)
  • BLUE BERRIES (One 8th note and two 16th notes)

These beginners snare drum exercises will help to read and play basic rhythm groupings.