Percussion Instruments: The Full List, and What Each One Is For

A percussion instrument is one you play by striking, shaking or scraping it. That is the whole definition, and it is loose enough to take in a kettledrum, a triangle, a set of tuned bronze discs and a hollowed-out log — which is why percussion is the only family that has no upper limit on its membership.

Everything below sorts by two questions. What is vibrating — a stretched skin, or the body of the instrument itself? And does the thing produce a note you could write down, or only a sound? Those two answers place every instrument here, and they also explain why a percussionist’s job looks nothing like a cellist’s.

Every percussion instrument, and what makes its sound

Two rows in there are worth stopping on, because they are the pair most often swapped. The tam-tam is the big flat bronze disc an orchestra hangs at the back, and it has no definite pitch at all. A gong proper has a raised boss hammered into the middle, and that boss gives it a note you can tune. The orchestral instrument almost everyone calls a gong is a tam-tam, and the word was borrowed into symphonic scores in the nineteenth century precisely to keep the two apart.

The two halves of the family

Split the list by what is vibrating and it falls cleanly into two, with a small awkward remainder.

Membranophones: a skin under tension

Everything with a head. The sound comes from a membrane stretched over an opening, and the shell underneath is a resonator rather than the source — which is why a conga made of oak and a conga made of fiberglass sound like each other and not like their materials. Timpani, snare, bass drum, toms, congas, bongos, djembe, tabla, bodhrán, taiko and the whole frame-drum world are here.

The cajón is the edge case, and it goes in this half by convention rather than by physics. Nothing on it is stretched; the front is a sheet of thin plywood screwed at the edges and left loose at the corners. It behaves like a head, so it is filed with the drums.

Idiophones: the instrument itself

Everything without a head. The whole body rings — bronze, steel, wood or gourd — and the material is the sound, which is exactly the opposite of the drums. Cymbals, triangle, claves, castanets, woodblocks, cowbells, maracas, güiro, every mallet instrument, the steel pan and the kalimba all sit here.

Idiophones sub-divide by how you set them going, and the categories are less obvious than they sound. Struck covers most of them. Shaken takes the maracas and the sleigh bells. Scraped takes the güiro and the washboard. Plucked takes the kalimba and the jaw harp, both of which are idiophones despite being played with the fingers.

The remainder, and why “percussion” is not a classification

Hornbostel–Sachs, the scheme museums use, has no percussion class. It has idiophones, membranophones, chordophones and aerophones, and percussion cuts across the first two while leaving a few instruments outside both. A piano is a struck chordophone: strings hit by hammers, numbered 314.122-4-8 in that system, which is why the question of whether it is percussion or strings dissolves rather than resolves. The cimbalom and the hammered dulcimer are the same case without the keyboard.

So percussion is a job in an ensemble, not a category in a taxonomy. That is worth holding on to, because it explains the whip, the wind machine and the typewriter part in Satie’s Parade. Those land on the percussion desk because it is the desk with a spare pair of hands, not because a classification put them there. The harp question runs the same way in reverse: it is plucked, it sits at the back, and it is a string instrument by every scheme going.

Pitched and unpitched, and what separates the mallet instruments

The second division is whether the instrument produces a note. Unpitched percussion — snare, cymbals, triangle, tambourine — carries rhythm and color. Pitched percussion plays written notes, and in practice that means the mallet instruments, timpani, tubular bells and the steel pan.

The five mallet instruments are the ones people mix up, and they are genuinely easy to mix up, because four of them are a row of bars over a row of tubes. Here is what actually separates them.

The xylophone and the marimba are the pair worth understanding properly, because they look almost identical and the usual explanation — that a marimba is just a bigger xylophone — is not what makes them sound different. The difference is in how the underside of each bar is cut away.

A xylophone bar is undercut shallowly, so its first strong overtone lands a twelfth above the fundamental. A marimba bar is hollowed much more deeply, which drops that overtone to two octaves above the fundamental. Yamaha calls these quint tuning and octave tuning. A note two octaves up blends into the fundamental and you hear one warm tone; a note a twelfth up sits outside it and you hear the bright, woody crack that makes a xylophone carry over a full orchestra. Same wood, same mallets, different cut.

The transposition column is the part that catches people out in a score. Write middle C for a glockenspiel and the player produces the C two octaves higher, which keeps the part off six ledger lines. The xylophone and the celesta do the same thing by one octave, and crotales by two. Marimba, vibraphone and tubular bells are all written where they sound.

The timpanist is not one of the percussionists

In a professional orchestra the timpani are a separate chair with a separate audition, and the person in it does not cover anything else. That is unusual enough to be worth explaining, because on paper the timpani are drums like any others.

Two things put them apart. They are pitched, and they are retuned constantly — a modern set has a pedal on each drum, and the player is adjusting them by ear, mid-piece, against an orchestra that is already playing. And they were in the orchestra a century before the rest of the section arrived; for most of the Classical period the timpani were the only percussion in the score at all, paired with the trumpets. Everything else was added later, and got a different job description.

A standard set is four drums, roughly 32, 29, 26 and 23 inches, covering about an octave and a half between them.

What the percussion section actually does

Three percussionists plus a timpanist is the usual establishment, and the section is the only one in the orchestra whose membership changes from one piece to the next. A string section is the same string section every night. The percussion section is whatever the score names, and the score might name a glockenspiel, a tam-tam, a set of sleigh bells and an anvil.

That has one consequence worth knowing if you are choosing an instrument. A percussionist is expected to play all of it. A violinist spends a career on one instrument; a section percussionist will move between snare drum, cymbals, xylophone, triangle and tambourine inside a single movement, and is judged on all five. It is the broadest instrumental training in the orchestra, and it is why the school route into percussion starts with a snare pad and a set of bells rather than with a drum kit.

The section sits at the back, behind the brass, with the timpani usually center or slightly left and the rest spread across the width of the stage — mallet instruments need floor space that no other section requires. Orchestra vs. band covers how that differs in a concert band, where the percussion section is proportionally larger and the writing is far busier.

The hand drums, and where each one comes from

Most of the percussion instruments people actually buy are hand drums, and they are not interchangeable. Each carries a technique and a repertoire.

• Djembe. West African, from the Mande peoples of what is now Mali and Guinea. A goblet-shaped body carved from one piece of hardwood, rope-tuned, played standing or with the drum tilted between the knees. Three sounds — bass, tone, slap — and a very wide dynamic range for something you can carry.
• Congas. Cuban, developed in the twentieth century from Afro-Cuban predecessors. Tall staved shells, played standing at a stand or seated with the drums tilted off the floor. Usually two or three at once, tuned to intervals rather than to notes.
• Bongos. Also Cuban, and far older than the congas. The pair is held between the knees, the smaller drum on the left, and the technique is fingertips rather than palms. The high, dry crack of a bongo is the sound of a martillo pattern under a son ensemble.
• Cajón. Peruvian, from Afro-Peruvian coastal music, and adopted into flamenco in the late 1970s after Paco de Lucía heard one in Lima. You sit on it and play between your knees. Modern ones have guitar strings or a snare pressed against the back of the striking face, which gives a snare-drum rattle at the top of the box and a bass note at the bottom.
• Tabla. North Indian, a pair rather than one drum: the wooden dayan under the right hand and the metal bayan under the left. The black disc on each head is a paste of iron filings and starch, applied in layers, and it is what makes a tabla pitched — it damps the head’s inharmonic overtones until a clear note is left.
• Mridangam. The South Indian equivalent, and one drum rather than two: a single barrel body of jackwood with a head at each end, played horizontally across the lap. It is the principal percussion of Carnatic music and of Bharatanatyam dance.
• Bodhrán. Irish, a shallow frame drum of goatskin, held vertically with one hand inside the head and struck with a double-ended beater called a tipper. The hand behind the skin is doing as much as the tipper — pressing it changes the pitch continuously, which is the whole technique.

Which percussion instrument to start on

The choice divides on one question: whether you are joining an ensemble that will tell you what to play, or buying something to play at home.

If it is a school band, the answer is decided for you. Beginning percussionists are put on a bell kit — a small glockenspiel, a rubber practice pad and a stand in one carrying bag — because the program needs players who can read pitched music before it needs another drummer. Nobody is handed a kit in year one.

If it is for yourself, the strongest first instrument is a cajón, for reasons that have nothing to do with how it sounds. It needs no stand, no sticks, no stool, no tuning and no amplification, it takes up the space of a footstool, and it is quiet enough for a flat with neighbors. Every other percussion instrument on this page needs at least one of those things.

On the drum kit, and the mesh-head question

An acoustic kit is the cheaper instrument and the harder purchase. A beginner five-piece is a few hundred dollars, but it also needs cymbals, which are sold separately and cost about as much again, and it needs a room where a bass drum is acceptable. Most people who want to learn drums do not have that room.

Mesh heads are the reason electronic kits stopped being a compromise. A mesh head is a woven fabric disc tensioned on a real hoop with a real key, so it rebounds like a drumhead instead of a rubber pad, and technique learned on one transfers to an acoustic kit. Rubber-pad kits do not do this and are worth avoiding at any price. The Nitro Max is the cheapest mesh kit with a dual-zone snare, which means rimshots register — the Alesis Turbo Mesh at around $300 is the same idea a step down, with smaller pads and a single-zone snare.

The cheap ones that are worth having

Three small instruments do more work in a home recording or a jam than their price suggests, and none of them needs a stand or a technique to be useful on day one.

• Claves, around $20. Two sticks of hardwood. Cup one loosely in your palm so the hand becomes the resonator — held tight, they click instead of ringing, which is the single mistake everybody makes with them.
• Tambourine, around $18. The crescent shape is not styling; it leaves the jingles at one end so you can hold it in one hand and strike the frame with the other. Nickel jingles are darker than brass and sit better under a vocal.
• Maracas, around $27. Rawhide rather than plastic, because the shell tone is most of the sound. They are played with a wrist flick that stops the fill dead against the far end, not shaken.

Percussion is probably the oldest family, and the evidence does not prove it

The claim gets made constantly and it is reasonable, but it is an inference rather than a finding. Clapping, stamping and striking two sticks together need no instrument to survive, so nothing survives.

What has survived is a flute. The bone and ivory flutes from Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle in southern Germany are between about 43,000 and 35,000 years old, and the Hohle Fels one — cut from the wing bone of a griffon vulture, with five finger holes — is the oldest more-or-less complete musical instrument anybody has dug up.

The oldest surviving drums are far younger. Alligator drums, made by stretching alligator hide over a hollowed wooden body, have been found across Neolithic China from Shandong to Qinghai and date to between 5500 and 2350 BC, chiefly from the Dawenkou and Longshan cultures. That is thousands of years after the flutes and it tells you about preservation rather than about invention: a hide head rots, a hollow bone does not.

Idiophones close some of that gap, because stone and bone survive. Lithophones — sets of tuned stones — turn up in Neolithic sites across several continents, and rattles and scrapers are older still.

The full percussion instrument list

Grouped by where you are most likely to run into them.

• Orchestra and concert band. Timpani, snare drum, field drum, tenor drum, bass drum, cymbals, hi-hat, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, triangle, tambourine, castanets, woodblock, temple blocks, claves, cowbell, maracas, güiro, cabasa, vibraslap, ratchet, slapstick, sleigh bells, wind chimes, anvil, whip, glockenspiel, xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, tubular bells, crotales, celesta, chimes, bell plate, thunder sheet.
• Drum kit and popular music. Snare, bass drum, rack and floor toms, hi-hat, crash, ride, splash, china, cowbell, tambourine, shaker, egg shaker, jam block, rototoms, octobans, electronic pads, drum machine.
• Latin America and the Caribbean. Congas, bongos, timbales, cajón, pandeiro, surdo, repinique, tamborim, cuíca, agogô, güira, chekere, bombó legüero, quijada, steel pan, marimba de chonta, claves, maracas.
• Africa. Djembe, dunun, sabar, ngoma, bougarabou, talking drum, udu, shekere, mbira, kalimba, log drum, balafon, water drums.
• India and South Asia. Tabla, mridangam, pakhawaj, khol, dholak, dhol, dholki, naal, kanjira, ghatam, thavil, chenda, idakka, damru, mizhavu, udukai, urumi.
• East and Southeast Asia. Taiko, tsuzumi, kakko, shime-daiko, uchiwa daiko, mokugyo, kane, hyoshigi, bonsho, kagura suzu, paiban, muyu, bangzi, zhu, gong, gong chimes, gamelan gongs, saron, bonang, kendang.
• Europe and the Middle East. Bodhrán, darbuka, doumbek, riq, bendir, daf, davul, zills, tapan, tupan, spoons, washboard, jaw harp, musical saw, handbells, tubular handbells.

Two instruments people expect to find here are missing on purpose. The piano and the cimbalom have strings, so they belong with the string instruments and the keyboard instruments respectively, however hard you hit them.

Read next

• Types of instruments: the five families, and how an instrument gets into one
• String instruments, woodwind instruments, brass instruments and keyboard instruments
• Is the harp a percussion instrument? and is the piano a string instrument?
• Orchestra vs. band and orchestra vs. symphony vs. philharmonic

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