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Where to get drum charts for songs

A drum chart is the file that tells a rhythm game which drum to hit and when, lined up with the song's audio. The Clone Hero, YARG and Rock Band communities have made and shared charts for tens of thousands of songs, drum parts included. This guide explains what a chart is, where people find them, how to tell whether a chart actually has drums, what the difficulty labels mean, and how to play along when you would rather not hear the original drummer. WebEDrums hosts no charts and never will; every link here goes to the community's own sites.

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What is a drum chart, exactly?

A folder. The Clone Hero manual puts the minimum plainly: a song folder must contain "a notes.chart/notes.mid, an audio file, and a song.ini". The notes file holds the hits for every instrument and difficulty; the audio is either one mixed file or several stems (drums, guitar, bass, vocals, the rest); song.ini carries the title, artist, the name of the charter (the person who built the note track) and per-instrument difficulty ratings. Album art and a background are optional extras.

Two packagings carry the same content. A .sng file is a single-file container for a song folder, which YARG reads and Chorus Encore offers as a download option. Rock Band customs come as Xbox 360 CON packages, which YARG and WebEDrums open directly; the Clone Hero FAQ points to conversion tools (Nautilus, Onyx) for those. A chart is not sheet music: it is written for a highway with a kick bar and four coloured lanes, and in Pro Drums each lane distinguishes a cymbal from a tom.

Where does the community share drum charts?

  • Chorus Encore (enchor.us) is the community's search engine for Clone Hero and YARG charts. Its front page has an instrument selector and a difficulty selector next to the search box, an advanced search, and lists its newest charts; when this page was checked it reported some 87,000 results. Its desktop version, Bridge, searches the same catalogue, downloads charts straight into your library as a chart folder or a .sng file, keeps instrument and difficulty filters between searches, and has a "Quality Reviewed" filter for drum charts.
  • RhythmVerse (rhythmverse.co) describes itself as a place to "create and find content for rhythm games under one platform" and shows Clone Hero, YARG, Rock Band 3, Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero on its front page. Filters stack, and you can browse by artist and album. It is where the Rock Band custom-song scene lives today.
  • The YARG Official Setlist: 86 songs charted by YARG's own team, every one "a full-band, full-difficulty chart", downloaded from the YARC Launcher, whose Marketplace is "where official YARG song packs can be freely downloaded".
  • The games' Discord servers, linked from clonehero.net and the YARG wiki, where charters post their work and setlists are announced. Each has its own rules; read them before asking.

This site keeps a small song index of its own: one page per song with a reviewed Pro Drums chart, listing the chart's facts and linking to its page on Chorus Encore, so you can see what a chart is like before you go and get it.

On rights, the YARG wiki says it does not encourage pirating and describes the intended use as songs you own, Creative Commons or public domain songs, or the built-in setlist. This site takes the same line: links to the communities, no files here.

How do I tell whether a chart has a drum part?

Many charts are guitar-only; Clone Hero began as a guitar game and the catalogue shows it. Three checks:

  • Filter before you download. Set the instrument to drums on Chorus Encore (or in Bridge) and the results are drum charts only.
  • Read song.ini. The YARG wiki documents diff_drums as the intensity rating of the 4-lane part and diff_drums_real as the rating of the Pro Drums part. pro_drums = True tells the game a Pro Drums chart is present even when it has no tom notes to detect it from, and five_lane_drums = True marks a 5-lane track.
  • Let the library tell you. YARG's library can show only songs with a four-lane or a Pro Drums part. WebEDrums reads song.ini and looks inside the chart for a drum track when it scans your folder; for .mid charts it can only be sure once the song is opened. Its library's "Find songs" box searches Chorus Encore's drum charts (or takes a pasted chart link) and fetches the chart straight into the browser, and every page of the song index has a "Try in WebEDrums" button that does the same.

What do Easy, Expert, Expert+ and Pro Drums mean?

  • Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert are four separate note tracks in the same chart, each written by the charter; a chart may have all four or only Expert. The per-instrument numbers in song.ini are the charter's intensity rating, not a standard scale.
  • Expert+ is Expert with extra bass kicks for double pedals, in YARG's words; Clone Hero exposes it as the 2x Kick modifier, and WebEDrums as the "2x kick notes" setting. Not every chart has it.
  • Pro Drums tells cymbals from toms within each lane, so a hi-hat note wants the hi-hat and a high-tom note wants the tom. It is the mode that makes an electronic kit worth having; all three games play it.
  • 5-lane is the Guitar Hero World Tour layout of three pads and two cymbals. Clone Hero converts 5-lane charts automatically; YARG plays them natively on a 5-lane layout.
  • Accents and ghosts are heavier and lighter hits marked in the chart; on an e-kit the games read them from the velocity of your stroke, and in Pro Drums only.

Can I play along without the original drums in the mix?

It depends on how the song's audio was packaged. A chart with separate stems has a drum file the game can mute, which turns the song into a drumless track with the notes on top; WebEDrums' "Original drums" setting applies only to songs with a separate drum stem and is off by default, so you hear your kit instead. A chart with a single mixed file keeps the original drummer in the song. That is still fine for playing along: your kit's sound sits on top of the mix, and the chart tells you what to play either way. If you specifically want drumless audio, choose charts with stems; Chorus Encore's chart pages list the files each one contains.

How do I keep a songs folder the games can read?

  • One songs folder, subfolders allowed. Clone Hero says song folders "may be contained in any number of groups and subgroups"; sort by artist, by charter or by setlist as you like.
  • Extract archives. Clone Hero requires songs to be extracted from the .zip, .rar or .7z they came in. WebEDrums opens a zip as well as a folder, but a tidy folder is easier to share between games.
  • Keep the charter's files as they are. Renaming notes.chart or the audio files breaks the song; edit song.ini only if you know what a field does.
  • Rescan after adding songs. Clone Hero scans songs in-game, YARG has Refresh per folder, and WebEDrums rescans the folder you picked; Chrome and Edge remember that folder between visits, Firefox cannot.

Sources

Checked on October 16, 2026. If one of these pages has changed and this guide has not caught up, tell us on the contact page.

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