Ba dum tss is a popular drum fill used to punctuate a bad joke that dates back to the early 1900s, around the same time as the birth of the drum set. Back then, drummers sat behind the curtains or screen, providing live foley for cabaret or silent films.
Ba dum tss has been around so long that it’s only used meta-ironically today, but imagine a time when the comedic sting was done in full ironical sincerity.
Ba dum tss sounds like the dum is on the 1, so I’ve notated it thusly:
Whether you prefer ba dum cha (with a rim shot) or ba dum ching (with a ride bell), the figure is often played as ba bap with two snares, although the ba dum implies it was once a snare and a kick drum combo. That’s how Wikipedia notates it. Sometimes drummers get lazy and just play a flam. In the Goodfellas clip above, each joke gets a different variation like a deconstructed drum solo.
In ba dum tss, the cymbal is played without a kick drum underneath, which I consider to be a heresy. This was common in the classical era when all the drum beats sucked. A cymbal should pretty much always have a kick drum, unless you’re doing a cymbal swell, or if you want to invoke a sucky classical feel. But hey, the ba dum tss originated from a time when drummers were like little babies with a brand new toy and didn’t know what they were doing.
