How to play Drums : The Ultimate Guide to Drumming

1. Promo Video: Hello and welcome to The Ultimate Guide to drumming. My name is room Barbara, and I am the creator and instructor of this course. I'm a professional musician based in Scotland. And for the last few years after graduating with a first-class Music degree, I've been busy gigging all over the country with different artists, and it's been so much fun. The main goal for this course is to provide a quality teaching experience. Take a complete beginner of drums all the way up to our competent, proficient musicians. Proficient musician, that's good. By the end of this course, you'll have a deep and extensive knowledge of rhythm, drums, and music. So what's in the course? As a start, we've got over nine hours of HD video along with studio quality audio. Every section of this course has goals and every lesson has been designed in a way where it gradually increases your skills. We start with lessons on getting the kit, setup, a naming all the drums, and making sure it's all in 2D. We then move on to hand and foot technique, rhythmic fundamentals, and then learning our first groups and fills. As the course progresses, we get to more advanced stuff, some more advanced rhythms. You also get to more advanced grooves, rudiments, triplets, all that good stuff throughout the course, there are rhythm exams that you can use to test yourself and see how you're getting on that are fantastic way to track your progress. Now alongside the video content, we've got downloadable PDFs of all the sheet music and lessons, and also workbooks and quizzes. Now these are fantastic because you can download them, print them off, and use them as reference material as you go along. Now for all the written material that is over 90 pages and there's over 360 musical examples. So there's so much to get through. But of course, learning all this stuff for the drums, it's not very fun with their music. And that's why I've included backing tracks of sheet music and also custom Spotify playlists that are directly related to the course's content. Also during the lessons there'll be pop-up notifications, song recommendations to what I'm actually playing on the drums at that point. It's really cool because you can learn wherever I'm playing on the drums at that point and just go and look up that song and you can play along to that song. There's also a dedicated section in the course that talks about all the different styles of music and how we plan them on the drums. There's even a lesson on playing with the basest. So if you're a complete beginner or yourself taut drummer that wants to learn a bit more about drums. Or maybe you're just a musician that Lakes rhythm and wants to learn more about rhythm. This course is for you. There's so much more than that, but I can't list all the things because it would take all day. If you want to know more, just scroll down and look at the course's content that, but you can see every single lecture and hopefully see you guys in there. 2. Parts of a drum kit: Hello guys and welcome to the first lesson of the course. In this lesson, we're gonna be looking at the different parts of the drum kit and their respective names. I believe that if you're learning an instrument, it's really good to learn how the instrument works and learning all the different parts that come with that instrument. The drunk gets quite a unique one because originally in orchestra settings, these different parts of the drum kit were played by different people. So maybe someone's playing the symbols, someone else's putting the snare drum, and then someone else again is playing the bass drum. Bus money became tighter and orchestras became smaller, ended up being one person in charge of all these different parts. And thus the drum kit was born. Now this drum kit I've got behind me is a fairly standard setup. If you go out and buy a beginner's drum kit, the setup is gonna be fairly similar, minus a couple of symbols maybe. So it's a fairly standard setup I'm using. And that's because most of you guys will be using a similar setup. So let's get into the different parts of the drum kit. We'll go through all the drums and then we'll go through all the symbols as well. Let's start off with one of the most important drums, the snare drum. The snare drum is physically located in the middle of the drum kit because you're gonna be using that a lot of the time, the snare drum is the most unique drum kit. If you turn it upside down, you'll notice that there's wires across the bottom of the snare drum. These metal wires across the bottom of the drama are called snare wires. These wires give the snare drum it snappy sound. The cool thing is that on the side of the snare drum, there is a mechanism that you can use that will disengage and engage the standard wires. You can really hear how different the snare drum sounds with the snare wires off and the snare wires on. Those wires are only on snare drums, and that's what makes them so unique. Snare drums come in a variety of shapes and sizes. But what makes them a snare drum is those wires in the bottom. Now let's look at the big drum that's on the floor. This is what we call the bass drum or the kick drum, and it's operated by a bass drum pedal. The bass drum is really the thumping heart of the drum kit and it provides that low end and that thump and that beef. A nice way to remember the name of the bass drum is to think that is on the bottom of the drum kits. So it's the basement. So basement, bass drum. It works for me, it might work for you as well. The bass drum is often called the kick drum as well, and they're pretty much interchangeable. Names are usually call it the bass drum though, like I said, we play that bass drum with the bass drum pedal, but we'll talk about how we actually operate that in another video. So far, we've got our snare drum, which has the wires and the bottom. And we've got our bass drum, which lives in the basement, and it's offered by the bass drum pedal. Now we've got three other drums that are called toms or tom-toms. These drugs are not as essential as the bass drum and snare drum, but they're very handy to have on a drum kit. We've got two different categories of Tom's. We've got rack toms and we've got four Toms. Rack toms are usually mounted on the bass drum or mountain off the symbol stands and then four times or on the floor and they've got legs. There's no real difference apart from the way they are mounted. In a normal setup, you'll have two or three times and they're always different sizes. The smaller drums are usually higher pitched, and the bigger they get, the lower pitch they go. The usual free Tom setup is to rack toms and then one for Tom, you normally have the first term, which is the small term. The second time which the midterm and then the third Thomas a photon. You can call these high, middle, and low Toms if you want. But the purpose of toms, or just to produce nice clean melodic notes. When we get into playing the drum kit, we'll use these in drum fills and different grooves, and they really just add a little variety into the drum kit. A nice way to remember the name of the toms is that they make that note. They go Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom. That works for me. It might work for you too. That's all your drums in the drum kit. You've got your snare drum. You've got your bass drum on your three toms, usually to rack toms and then one for Tom on the floor. Next, let's move on to symbols. In a standard drum kit setup, you have three different categories of symbols. Firstly, we have our hi-hat symbols, the high hat symbols, other ones that are operated on the stand with the foot pedal. You have the two symbols that open and close and come together. The hi-hat symbols are probably one of the most important symbols you can have on a drum kit. They're incredibly versatile and they create a nice timekeeping science and you can use them a lot in groups. If you had to pick three things from a drum kit, you'd have the bass drum, the snare drum, and the hi-hat. With that, you can get through a lot of songs. Like I said, the high hat can be opened and closed with the foot pedal. If they're closed really tightly, you can get a nice short note. When they're opened up, you get a more slushy, explosive sound. So they're very versatile. You'll be putting the hi-hats quite a lot. So definitely get used to the different zones. Next up, we've got the ride cymbal. The ride cymbal is usually the biggest symbol on the drum kit. And again is used for timekeeping, is usually a heavier symbol and it's got a nice pinging sound to it. So it's a great symbol for if you want to grieve along and you want to have a different sound from the hi-hat. The final basic category of symbols or crash cymbals. Crash symbols are usually smaller than red symbols. And a lot later, these symbols are often used as accents symbols, and you usually hit them once and get a nice explosive sound out of them. There are a lot of fun to play and they can produce a really cool sound. The query a bit of excitement around the drum kit. If you watch any drama, you'll see that deplete a crash cymbal all the time. And those are your three basic symbol categories. You've got your high hats, which are the two symbols that open and close with the foot pedal. Then you've got your rights and move it to the big heavy one. And then you've got your crash symbols, which are used as accents and explosive sounds. One thing I want to mention about symbols is that they have different parts on the symbol. If we start at the very center of the symbol, we've got a bump. This part of the symbol is called the bell. And it's really cool because you get a nice pinging sound over. You'll often use that part of the symbol when you're playing on the right cymbal. Next up you've got a large surface of the symbol and that's called the board, the symbol. That's where you're gonna be playing. A lot of the ride cymbal and a lot of the hi-hat as well. Finally, you've got the edge of the symbol. Striking the edge of the symbol is going to give you a less controlled sound. Gonna give you a more explosive sound, is a great place to play. The crash cymbals just play on the edge of the symbol and you'll get that explosive sound immediately. And those are your three areas of assembly. You've got your bell for more precise, accurate playing. You've got your bowl for general playing, and you've got your edge for more load explosive plane. And those are all the different parts of the drum kit. Let's do a quick recap of everything. We start off with the snare drum, which has the wires underneath. We then move on to the big bass drum, which is in the basement. And we've got our three Toms. Hi Tom, Tom and our floor term or low tone. For symbols, we have our hi-hat, which of the two symbols like that, we then have a ride cymbal normally, which is a big symbol, usually quite heavy. And we've got our crash symbols, which are explosive layer assembles. And we've got different parts of the symbol. We've got our belt, we've got our bot and our edge, and these all produce different sounds. Now that's a lot of information to remember. So in the lesson, dynodes, I've made a little worksheet that you can use to help you remember all the different parts of the drum kit. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk about how we can tune the drums and get the most out of the drum kit. See you there. 3. Tuning your drums pt1 : Hello and welcome back. In this lesson, we're gonna be looking at how we tune drums. Now specifically, I'm gonna talk about how hygiene my drums, because tuning is such a subjective thing. You can honestly make an entire course dedicated to tuning drums because there's so many different things you can do on different combinations of heads and all sorts of things. With that being said, I'm just going to do what I do and show you what I do. And if you like it and fantastic. If it's not quite your bag, then take it from there and just go and tweak it and then find your own drum sound that you enjoy. There's no right or wrong answers when it comes to drum tuning. So just find something that works for you and inspires you. Alright, let's get into the training. And the best part is you don't have to look at my face for the rest of the video because it's totally cut out. I'm going to start off by tuning the toms first. And specifically I want to tune the midterm first. The reason I want to tune this 1 first is because then you can actually pitch and reference that other drums from this, you can tune your higher Tom slightly higher than this. And then you can tune your floor tom slightly lower than this. It's a great reference drum for your other drums. Let's firstly talk a bit about the basic physics of drums. Drums have a top and bottom surface. They have the batter heads and the residence site head. The heads are just the plastic surfaces that you play. The bathroom side is the one that you hit, and the resonance side is the one that just resonates when you hit a drum, the badger head vibrates like this. Then the resonance site also vibrates as well. And that creates sustain. A good simple rule to get you started at and drum tuning is that the batter site will produce the pitch and the resonance hybrid produce the sustain or the length of the note. Thinking is about drum head is that they actually produce about 80% of the drum sound. It doesn't matter too much if you've got a basic kit or a appropriate having good heads on the drums, I'm going to give you a nice sound. There's lots of different manufacturers out there have drum heads and they all have different models and different types of drum heads. There's way too many to actually talk about in this video. So I recommend you check out the manufacturers such as remote Evans and a query and then check out their models and they'll have much better descriptions than I can give you. What I like to do is have a two-ply clear batter site and then a one clear Resonance site that works for me and that gives me the same that I want, but it might not work for you. So the best part is that tuning on head choice is totally subjective and it's really up to you to get the same that you want. There's no right or wrong rules, there's just preference really. Anyway, let's stop blubbering and let's get into the tuning. Now what I've done is taken off the top and bottom heads and the hoops, which you can see at the bottom here. And what I've done is I've got a little rag and I've just cleaned the bearing edges. The bearing edges are just the part where the, the drum head comes in contact with the drama. And this is the very important part of the drama, and that's where you get the sound. Now when I'm tuning a drum, I like to start off with the butter headfirst. Here's my bachelor head is just an Evans G2, which is a two-ply clear head. And the first thing I like to do is make sure that it fits on the drum nicely. You want to make sure that there's not too much movement happening in the drum head and they're just sits nicely on the drug. The next thing we do is get our hoop and we put that over the drum head. Just get the hoop on the drum and makes sure that these, these tension roads here are screwed into the lungs, which are these boxes here. What we wanna do is get them off finger tight, so I'll quickly do that. Alright, these are all finger tight and I've just got them tightened up. The point where I can't really take them anymore with my fingers. And there's gonna be absolutely no torn from this. Sounds pretty rubbish so far, what I like to do at this stage is put my hand on the drum head and get a little bit of pressure. Hopefully you can see in the video that there's some wrinkles around the head. Why then do is go around the drum at opposite ends and tune up until I can't see any more wrinkles. So maybe I start on this log and then go over to the other side and then tune this went up and then go over to this side, tune that went up in opposite. And just keep doing it that way. Going through the opposite lugs like this will help you keep the drum head in the center of the drum and make sure that it doesn't slip to one side. So I'll quickly do that. It doesn't take too much to do this, to be honest. And that's already starting to look pretty good. So at this point is pretty low. If you want a low sounding drum, this is a good place to start. I'm going to turn it up slightly more on what I'm gonna do now is go round and tap each lug and hear how each of these sounds, because we want these to be equal in pitch around the drum. Because what that's gonna do is it's going to give you a nice clean tone throughout the drum. For example, if you have this one really tight and it produces a higher note, rent this area. And this one's really loose and has a lower note. It's going to produce some weird overtones and it's not going to sound as nice. Now listening to each lug takes a little time to get used to because there's low overtones and you're going to have to really listen and hear how these different pitches sound. And that will take time to help you here what's going on? I just simply put my hand on the drum with no pressure just to dampen it. And then I go around and tap. So I don't know if you can hear this from the microphone, but this one is really high and this one is really low. It's quite hard to hear and pick up with the microphone, but that one's quite high and that one's quite low. And the thing is you might want to tighten this one, but Bob guts and this amazing drummer and this amazing inventor of drum tuning techniques actually recommends that you don't tune this one up if it's low, but shouldn't the one opposite. Because then that will seat the head and it will move it over to this side. So when I tune this one, actually made this site to NEP, which is quite cool. Really. Once you get your drum head to a pitch where you want it, just go around and make sure that everything sounds the same around these lugs. Okay. I've got it fairly even though that's your hair, that sounds so science pretty nice. Science pretty clean. And that picture is fairly low, but that's how I want it. By the way, this little tool here is called a drunk key, and it's your best friend, although you're probably going to lose it about 20 thousand times because I've got about 50 drum keys and God knows where they are. I've got about three left. So enjoy buying more of these, you know, but, you know, they're very handy for tuning. Let's do the resonance side note. No tuning the resonance site is a very simple process. It's the exact same thing as the batter site. If you want the drug to resonate and sustain for a long time, you're going to tune this to the exact same pitch as your other head. What I personally like to do is actually tune this slightly higher than the batter site. What that's gonna do is reduce the sustain and keep things in control. The first step is making sure that these tangent roads or finger tight around the drum in all these lugs. Alright, that's it. All finger tight. And now let's do the same thing and put some pressure on the drum head and get rid of those wrinkles. Again using opposite lugs. This head is never a point where if I put pressure down, there's no wrinkles on this actually already resonating quite nicely. Let's compare that to the backside. It's already naturally pitched higher. I'm actually fairly happy about where this picture is out on the resident's side. So now the final step is to make sure all these different logs are the same pitch. I'm again, a nice tone of this head. Again, I don't know if you can hear this, but this one is really high. And this one's really low. It really helps if you're in a very quiet environment. So you can really hear what's going on. Alright, that's been trained up the resonance sides. Let's give it a nice top. And these are mythic Saturn drums, and these are very nice drums because they do resonate quite a lot and you get lots of stain, which is very nice. But if you want to control that, I recommend you get some gummy stuff, meningeal, anything you want or tape. And if you want to control that ring, just stop some on the bachelor site. Now of course, you want to test the drum by giving it a good whack with a drumstick. So to me that's tuned fairly low, but I liked the sound of it. And that's gonna be my reference pitch for the high and low tones. I'm going to keep it like this, but what you can do is mess around and maybe tune the butter side up there between the resonance side up, maybe tune the butter side down and the resonant up or down. I'm just mess around with different combinations. It does take a while to get used to tuning, but the main thing you wanna do is make sure all these lugs are the same pitch. And that's gonna give you a nice clean tone from the drum. And then everything else is kind of subjective. I'm going to go for the exact same process for the high and low tone. Now if you aren't aware of the smaller the drum, the higher pitch is going to be the 10-inch Tom that I've got, which is my hi Tom. I'm going to tune a slightly higher than this. The floor tom, I'm going to lower and you're getting a nice range of different tones. I'm gonna do those off-camera, but the same process applies. Finger tight and all the tension rods in the lugs, Pearson pressure onto the drum head and makes sure that there's no wrinkles. And then get up to a pitch that you like. And then finally go around and just tap each log and make sure they're all in June. If you want the drug to resonate a lot, make sure that this top and bottom head or the same pitch. If you want the drug to be a bit more focused, just tighten up the bottom side of the head and that's it for toms. 4. Tuning your drums pt2: Alright, let's move on to bass drums. Now, unlike Tom's, you don't really want to sustain to know, oh, the bass drum. The only time you might want a sustained note is if you're playing jazz or something like that. But for rock, pop and funk, you just want a low, beefy bass drum. I'm going to show you what I do to get a nice solid bass drum like the toms. I'm going to start off with the butter side and I'm just going to seat the head. Next. I'm going to grab my hoop and makes sure that fits as well. Now all I need to do is grab all my tension rods and hoop clause, which are these things which are attached to the hip and tighten the head down. And we're gonna get started just like the toms. I'm going to finger tight and all these tension rods into the lugs. Alright, that's all fingers tightened. That already sounds pretty beefy. The next step once you've got these all finger tight and it's just to put a little bit of pressure on the head and then get rid of those wrinkles. Once again, we're going opposite logs. It's got rid of all the wrinkles. We're getting a nice beefy tone from the drum. Now. Once again, I'm going to go round the drum and just get every log sending. Very similar. You might notice there's a lot of rattling, but don't worry, that's just because all these lugs, I still lifts and once we get this front head on, it'll be fine. Okay, Let's look at the resonance side of the bass drum now, before I put the head on, what I like to do is I actually like to put something in the bass drum. It doesn't have to be a lot. Just like a small pillow. Just something in the bass drum that's going to help lower the pitch and give you a more focused sound. I'm going to put it in so it just touches both the front and back head slightly, but not too much. You don't want to overstep the bass drum because then you'll have no tone whatsoever. You just want enough in your bass drum just to muffle it enough, where it becomes more focused on more low pitched. With that being said, let's get the resonance Aidan, for me, it's pretty much the same technique as before. Just finger tight and everything, put some pressure on the bass drum and get rid of those wrinkles. And then just fine tune it and make sure it's all in pitch. As you'll notice, I've got a massive hole in this bass drum and that's to get a microphone in. There also means I can adjust the internal damping so I can move the pillow around and really kind of fine tune where it's going to be. Then when you add a massive hole into drum head, it makes this part of the tuning a bit more difficult, but it's well worth it for the advantages. Like I said, you can move around your muscling. You can add a microphone in there. But also because you've got a whole, the air can escape and you get a much punchier bass drum. You want more attack from your bass drum, then absolutely add a whole interior resonance side. It doesn't have to be this big either. It can be a bit smaller. I just went a bit over the top. Anyway, let's get all these claws, intention, rods, finger tight again. Alright, It's all finger tight. And so let's just put some pressure on the head and just look for some wrinkles. I think we're actually doing alright here. Just a couple here. But really, you don't want the resonance site to be super, super tight, just want enough to resonate really. That's given me a nice low end. I don't know if it's getting captured in this mic, but I'm getting a nice rumble from this. Now it sounds a bit papery and that's because of this hole here is making things a bit weird. But once we get this muscling on this side of the drum, it will get rid of that. So finally we just take our mallet and just go around and just make sure everything's sending. Alright. I think luckily we've actually managed to make this all in 2D, right? Let's get this properly set up and get all the muscling inside sorted. Okay, let's mess around with the muscling inside the bass drum. I'm just going to use a soft Peter and just hit it in the center of the drum, just like a bass drum pedal. Right now the pillows just end there and it's not touching either the front or back head. Now I'm hearing a lot of vibration from this front head, so I'm actually going to move it forward to just muffle this front-heavy bit. And now it's completely off the bat cat is still the back your head. That sounds really nice. I mean, that sounds pretty perfect for me. The microphone is right here, so you hopefully getting a lot of that low end, but honestly in the room it sounds absolutely beefy. I want to mention as well that this is a 20 inch bass drum and not 22 inch base Trump. Most setups have a 22 inch bass drum, but this one is slightly smaller, so it's not got as much low end. But I think we've done pretty well. And that's where you get a nice day underline bass drum sound. Just get a nice low pitch on both the batter and resonance side. And then just chuck something small into the bass drum. You don't have to completely overstuffed it because that's going to kill the low end. The final thing we're going to look at is tuning a snare drum. I left this one for last because I think the snare drum is one of the most important drums on the drum kit. The way you tune a snare drum is very personal to you. And honestly, a lot of drummers have a signature snare sound. So in your case, you might like a very low tuned, fat snare drum, or you might like a really cranked high pitch snare drum. That's totally up to you to decide an experiment for yourself. Personally, I like a very sensitive high pitch snare drum that's got a crack and a lot of power. And that's how I'm going to tune the snare drum today. So far what I've done is I've just put the head on and I've just finger tight and all the logs. So right now we're getting a pretty nasty sound. Now before we actually tune this side of the snare drum, I'd like to turn it over and actually tune the bottom side first, the resonance side. Now you might notice when you're tuning your resonance site on the snare drum, when you try it unit, the snare wires are going to rattle on. Easy trick you can do is loosen off the snare wires but the mechanism, and then just stick your drumstick underneath. And that will keep the wires off the drum head. Now I've actually already tuned this up and I want to demonstrate how it sounds. The way I like to turn my resonance side to the snare drum is very high. Have a listen. That's the way I like to junit. Electrogenic quite high, almost like tabletop hard. And that's because it provides a lot of sensitivity and a lot of breathiness and air into the snare drum. You can also try changing it a little bit lower as well. But for me, I'm running at high, definitely higher than the buyer side. When you're tuning this side of the drum, makes sure to pay attention to these forelegs next to the wires. That's because there's an indentation in the drum shell here on the bearing edge. Just to get these snare drum wires fitted properly, it can be a bit harder to get in pitch, but once you've got it, you've got it. And that's how I turn the resonance side. Let's move on to the butter side. Note for the snare drum sound that I want, which is really high pitched. It's pretty easy. I just put my hand on and just get it all cranked up with opposite tuning and then just pitch it up, keep pitching up until you get to the pitch you want. And then just go around and make sure everything's in pitch. Now, don't be intimidated by the snare drum. It's very simple to June is very much like a TomTom. The only difference is you're probably going to be tuning it a lot higher. We'll start off by getting rid of all the wrinkles. And again, going opposite lugs to make sure the head is seated properly and it's not slipping to one side. It really helps if you've got a light source so you can see the wrinkles and the snare drum. Sounds pretty rubbish. We've got a lot of nasty tones there because we've not actually pitched our logs yet, because we're not finished pitching the drum. So that's sounds pretty nasty because we've not actually pitched our drum up properly and each lung is not in tune with each other. Also, we've got a lot of rattling from the wires and we'll sort that in a second. But for now I'm going to keep pitching it up. Okay, we're now getting to a nice neutral territory. This is a nice mid tuning here. Now just by changing up this batter head, we've already got a nice sounding snare drum. We've even got rid of the snare Rattle. Now, if you're happy with that pitch of the drum, you can go around each luck and make sure they're all in June. I want to take this further. Alright. I'm at the picture. I'm quite happy. It's fairly high but still got some body to it. If you kept going higher and higher, It's gonna be a point where the snare drum chokes out and it just sounds pretty rubbish. I'm going to keep it there so it doesn't totally chalk out. And as always, once you've got the pitch V-Lake, I'm gonna go round and just tune these lugs and make sure they're all in sync and engine with each other. Now I'm pretty happy with that. So now I'm happy with the drum sound, but I'm not happy with the snare drum wires because they're rattling a bit. Now what you'll notice on your mechanism is you've got your lever to turn the snares on and off. What you've also got is a little grommet here. Now, turning this clockwise will tighten up the snare drum wires and turning it anticlockwise or loosen the snare drum wires. So ever listened to snare wires here? So it sounds. Then if I tighten them back up, that point it starts to shortcut the drums. So you've got to find a sweet spot where you get a nice bit of sensitivity. And still you get the body of the drum and it's not choking out from being too tight. For me, it's around there, but for yourself, it might be different. All right, I'm pretty happy with that snare drum sound. Let's hear how it sounds properly. 5. Are you left or right handed : Now shortly I'm going to show you how you set up your drum kit. But before that we need to answer a very important question. And that is if you're left or right-handed as a drummer, whether you're a left-handed or right-handed drummer, is going to affect how you set up your kit and also how you read the drum music in this course. Now I'm personally a right-handed drummer and ninety-nine percent of you will be. What this means is that my right hand is delete hand in my drumming. So the right hand is always playing first in the fills and grooves and stuff. If you're left-handed drummer, your left hand takes lead and your left hand does most of the work. The funny thing is I'm actually left-handed. I write with my left hand, but a drum as a right handed. And that's because at my school, the drums were set up for a right-handed person because I just started drumming. This was no problem. You can't be a left-handed person that plays a right hand drum kit or a right-hand drummer playing a left hand drum kit. It just depends on what you find more comfortable. A simple way to test if you're left or right-handed drummer is to simply play alternating strokes in your lap. If you feel more comfortable starting with our right hand, then absolutely That means you are right-handed drummer, vice versa. If you feel like playing with your left hand first is more comfortable, then that means you're probably going to be more comfortable play and left-handed kit. Like I said, the course's content is based on being a right-handed drummer. The sheet music you'll see in this course is all based around a right-hand lead. If you do decide that being a left-handed drummer is more comfortable for you. All we need to do is look at the sheet music and reverse the sticking. So for example, if there's an exercise that's right, right, right, left, you just reverse the sticking where it goes. Left, left, left, right. It's a bit more work, but honestly ninety-nine percent of you are gonna be right-handed drummers. So do bear that in mind if you decide to be a left-handed drummer. The other thing you want to know is that left-handed drum kits are mirror images of right-handed drunk kids. And because I play a right hand, the drum kit, that is what's used in this course. So when you are watching these videos, it might be confusing, translating stuff that I'm playing in my course to the stuff that you're playing on your left-handed kit. The best way to think of it as just a mirror image of your kit. Personally, if it was me, I would just go ahead and be a right-handed drummer because it saves a lot of hassle. But if you do feel like you're really more comfortable with your left hand leading things then absolutely go for it. I do think being a left-handed drummer on the right hand of kit has its advantages because you already have a lot more control in your left hand compared to other players. So just bear that in mind fellow left-handers, I can't really tell you the answer if you're left or right-handed drummer, this is something you have to find out for yourself. For 99% of you, it doesn't really apply because you're all right-handed anyway. And this will just make sense. For the 1% that are left-handed, you have to decide if you want to be a fool left ear with a full left-hand kits, or you just want to play a normal right-hand kit. Hopefully that makes sense though. And now let's talk about how we can set up the drum kit. 6. How to position your drum kit properly: In this lesson, we're going to talk about how we set up our drum kit. Drum kits come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, just like people do. So no saps is gonna be the same. What I'm gonna do in this lesson though, is give you a few pointers and things that you want to be aware of when you're setting up your own drum kit. The main thing you want to consider when you're setting up your drum kit is that it's comfortable and it's ergonomics so you can get around the drum kit and you're not straining or stretching or hurting yourself. Playing drums is a very physical activity and you want to make sure that your drum kits setup so you're not straining yourself. So let's get started. Before I talk about anything, I'm gonna mention that I've got a rug down where the drum kit is gonna be. The reason I've done this is because if you're playing on a hard surface, the bass drum can scratch the floor. Having a rock to prevent that is a good start, and also it will stop things slipping away. The first thing I always start with is the drum stool. Now the first thing you want to do is adjust the height of the drum stool. The way I like to set up is that my knees are slightly below the waist or you absolutely don't want to have is setting your stool up so low that your knees are above your waist. Setting your drum still too low can cause lower back pain. And really it's not advisable. A good place to start is just having your thighs slightly sloped down and then you can take up or slightly down from there. The next thing you wanna do is add the snare drum because that is really the essential central part of the drum kit. There's two things you want to adjust in the snare drum, and that is the angle and the height. I'd like to adjust the height first. If I take my drumstick and place it on the drum like this, I feel like this is way too little because I'm gonna be hitting my leg with the drumstick of a plane like this. So I'm gonna raise it up. I've taken this to the extreme and put it way too high. Now when I put my drumstick down like this and hold it there, you'll notice that my shoulder has to be up like this to actually play the snare drum. And I'm kinda tense. You want to find a middle ground between these two heights. Now for me, this height is perfect because if I lay my drumstick down on the snare drum and I grab it like this. My hand and my whole arm and shoulder are not tense at all, and this feels very natural. Next step, you've got your snare drum angle. Know for me, I like it pretty much flat. The reason I like it flats because you can whack it and you get a lot of power and you don't have to try too hard. The drumstick naturally wants to be in that position anyway because that's where my relaxed hand is. So it just works for me. Some people like to angle it towards them and some people like to angle it away, have a mess around with different angles. And my recommendation is that you don't go to extreme with the angles and just keep it fairly flat. That's my snare drum setup. I feel very comfortable at the height and angle. I don't have to bring my elbow or reach up like this to play it. It's just very natural and comfortable. The next thing to do is place your foot pedal stone. My recommendation is to just sit down and just notice where your feet land. And that's really the natural position. Once you're in your natural position, just slide the pedals underneath. Alright, this field is ideal for me because I'm not twisting. I don't have to balance myself. It just feels completely natural. Now that I'm happy I'm going to attach the bass drum to the bass drum pedal. Alright, once that's all fit together, just make some minor adjustments and make sure everything's all comfortable. And you feel like you can play and feel comfortable about it. Just pick up your sticks and just reach around the drum kit and try the pedals and make sure things feel natural. Next up, let's look at Tom's. When I'm setting up Tom's, I always start with a photon. It's really easy to set up. All you do is copy that angle and the height of the snare drum. Stay. So that's pretty much the same height and the same angle. And again, just take your stinks and just make sure that you can reach that nice and easy and you're not twisting too much or you're not having to go too low or too high, just make it nice and comfortable. That's absolutely perfect for me. Like I said, just match that angle and height of the snare and there'll be, alright. You might want to angle it slightly towards you in a different way. Let's look at the rack toms now. For right columns, you want to make sure they're not completely flat and they're not completely vertical. You want to have them in a nice comfortable position. For example, right now there are way too vertical. If I was playing this note, fuels are very, very uncomfortable. I like to play them a lot more flat, so I'm gonna do that right now, a good angle, but there are way too high. They're way above the bass drum on this, but half a stick above the snare drum. So there's a lot of reaching going on. We can have to reach over and stretch yourself to play these toms. So all it needs to do is just bring them down. I've lowered these two toms and they feel fantastic. Now. I'm now at a point where it can reach every drum very comfortably without stretching or overreaching and stuff. I know I can definitely play these much more comfortably. These are slightly angled towards me and they're fairly low. And that's the way I like because I'm a pretty small, stocky dude. I need everything quite tight because my arms are really small. You might be different if you're quite lanky, you may want to spread these drums out and spread the symbols are and the snare drum and high hat. But whatever works for you, right now, we can add our symbols. Alright, the symbols or the last part of the puzzle. So I've got a crash cymbal and a rate symbol right here. Let's position this crash cymbal first. Right now I'm having to reach out and overextend to actually hit this symbol. I've brought it in slightly, so now it's very comfortable to play. It's pretty much the same distance from the top, but they're not really overlapping as you can see, I've also angled it's slightly towards me because if you angle it completely flat, especially when you're a beginner, you might end up cracking the symbol. For now while you build your technique, I recommend you put your symbols towards you like this. Yeah, right now, I can reach the bell, I can reach the ball, I can reach the edge. And it's all perfect. And it's not getting in the way of anything that we did the exact same thing with the raid symbol. Now right now, I'm having to stretch to reach that bell, so I'm going to bring it in slightly. I brought it in between the second term on the floor, tom. And it feels quite nice now, I'm not stretching. I can hit the bell quite easily and it just feels quite nice and comfortable. If you want to add another symbol or crash symbol here, then go for it. In terms of symbol. Hi, I like to keep them fairly low because you can see what's going on. Firstly, you can be in lots of band foot was because the symbols aren't in the way. But also because if they're too high, you're gonna have to reach up and it's going to be quite painful after awhile. Just keep them at a comfortable height where you're not having to move too much. And it's going to make your playing a lot more smooth. You're gonna be able to play a lot faster. Taking the time to make your setup as comfortable as possible for you is going to really vastly improve your plate. I really do think taking those extra 1015 minutes to do that is going to improve your drumming tenfold. Right now. I'm very comfortable and I'm ready to start playing drums. Alright, that's how you set up your drum kit. Hopefully you'll take something away from this and go and adjust your drum kit and make sure that it's all comfortable. Once you've got your setup on, you're happy with it. Just go play it for a few hours and listen to your body. If there are things that are starting to ache or hurt, let your shoulders or your back or something, just go back to the drawing board and see where that's coming from. It might be that your seats too low or your snare drums too high or something along those lines, It's really important to be aware of that so you don't cause injury. Along with that, the most important thing when you're playing drums is posture. You want to have a very straight back, chest out and you want to have very good posture. You really don't want to be hunched over or leaning back because that's going to cause problems. Having good posture when you're playing the drums allows you to breathe properly and it'll keep you relaxed and loose. So really, really focus on posture as well. Now I mentioned this before, but if you're left handed, the same rules apply. But the drum kit is basically mirrored. So your bass drum will be operated by your left foot, up by your right foot, and your Thompson symbols are gonna be the other way round. And just a reminder, if you are playing left-handed, the sheet music in this course has to be reversed in terms of the sticking. But yeah, that is how you set up a kit. 7. Hand Technique : Right, So holding your sticks, holding your sticks is probably one of the most important lessons in this entire course. Because if you're not holding you sticks correctly is really going to hinder how well you can play drums. For a number of years, I was self-taught and I never actually learned properly how to hold the stick. By that point, I'd picked up a lot of bad habits, so I spent a lot of time correcting those. And when it did actually learn, it made a huge difference to my playing. To stop that from happening to you guys and having to go back and correct yourself. I'm going to teach you the proper way to hold a stick from the very get-go. And that means you've got a solid foundation. And you're gonna be able to play properly by the way, to make things easier so I can talk while playing the drum. I've got an electronic drum which makes no noise. Just in case you were wondering what this was is just an electronic drum and it's a great little practice pad as well. So holding the drumstick, where did we actually start? But what we do is we take our index finger and our thumb, and we placed the drum stick in our first little joint of our index finger like this. We then take your thumb and put it at the opposite side of the stick with the index finger is we're not gripping gripping with the near like this or the thumb on the side like that. It's just as nice, comfortable, relaxed state here. Now this is the point where you're gripping the stick. Most know when you're holding your stick between the thumb and the index finger, you don't want to squeeze it then really tightly, just keep it loose and relaxed in this place in the thumb and index finger is where we pivot the stick. Now this is very, very important. We need to figure out where the fulcrum of this Trump's tickets. Now the fulcrum and the state is just the perfect balancing point for your hands is just where you put your thumb and your index finger. At what point? And the drumstick, every drumstick is different, but I'm going to show you a little trick that helps you establish where the fulcrum is. What you need to do is loosely hold the drumstick with your thumb and index finger. And what we need to do is lift the drumstick and let us strike the snare drum or practice pad. And all we're gonna do is listen to the amount of bonuses. All we need to do is move the drumstick up and down until we get to that sweet spot where we get the most bounces. And we also have the most balanced between the drumstick. If they go too far up the drumstick, there's no power. So I'm getting less bounces. If I go to the bottom of the drumstick, all the rebounds are gonna be choked by the way at the drumstick. All we need to do is find the point in the drumstick where you get the most bounces. That's still feels a bit choked out. I'm going to move up a wee bit more. That feels pretty good. I'm going to go way up. That feels a bit weak. So I'm going to move back down. And I think for this drum stick around this point, now finding this fulcrum is the most important part of holding the drumstick. Because once you have that fulcrum, you've gotten the most leverage and you've got the most power, and you're gonna be able to play drums are lot more smoother. Once you have found that fault come in your drumstick, you can get away Sharpie and just draw a line where that is. That means you can just pick up the drumsticks and look where the fulcrum is. A no, you're ready to go. And of course, with experienced in practice, you could just pick up a pair of sticks and know exactly where the fulcrum is without doing all that stuff. Alright, we've got the fulcrum established and we've got our two fingers feeling good around the stick. The next part is to wrap your other fingers around and that helps control the drumstick. And that is your basic grip here. Then the main thing is that you don't grip and squeezed the drumstick as hard as you can because that'll chocolate the drama and it will cause damage to your wrist. You want to keep it nice and loose. I really good analogy for holding drumsticks is that you've got a bird and that you don't want to squeeze it too hard or device you might hurt it. But you don't want to let it go completely because it will fly away. So just somewhere in-between where it feels loose, uncomfortable, but still controlled. So you're gripping the stick with these two fingers mostly like this. It's almost like a seesaw action. And then the other three fingers are there for power and control. Now we've got a drumstick feeling good. Let's move on to hand positioning. Now hand positioning is a lot more subjective and everyone's going to have different opinions of what they prefer. The main thing is you want to do what's more comfortable to you. We've got three main hand positions we want to consider. The first position is the palm is completely facing the ground like this. This is nice because the forearms loose on the drumstick just extends out at the hand like this. The next position is where we've got the thumb on top of the drumstick. Now personally, this feels very comfortable to me and it's something that I usually play it on the hi-hat and the ride cymbal. Some people like the thumb on top, but some people like having the thumb to the site and the palm down. It's really up to you and how your body works and what feels more natural to you. The third position is somewhere between the palm completely down and the thumb completely up, is around this area and this feels very comfortable. This grip is called the American grip. The palm down grip is called the German grip. On the thumb up is called the French grip. Now the thing is about the thumb grip is that you'll probably be playing it at some point because the way that the drunk is actually positioned with the right symbol up here and the floor tom down here. It makes more sense to play with the thumb like that. You can, of course, keep the grip and keep the palm down like that. But for me personally, I prefer playing with the thumb up when I'm playing that the toms or the high hat for the snare I usually keep to American grip. We've looked at is the right hand, but that's because the left hand is the exact same. It's the mirror image. So we just established the fulcrum and a grip on our hand position and then we're all set. When you've got your two sticks up like this, you don't want to have your angle of the sticks way too wide or way too shallow because that's gonna be very uncomfortable. You want to have it so that your elbows are tucked into your side of your body but not to tucked in where your shoulders are tense, but just enough where it feels comfortable and natural position. So plane like this are playing that this would be really straightening on the body and you'd have a sore back and shoulders after awhile, just find that sweet spot where it feels comfortable. And obviously everybody is different, so it's gonna be different for everyone. And that's how you hold your drumstick. You firstly start with the first indentation of the index finger and the soft part of the fun. Gripping that stick not too firmly but not too loosely. Hold it firmly enough where it's not slipping or your hands, but not so much where it's really tense and you can actually maneuver it. Then establish where the balancing point or the fulcrum is. And then wrap your other fingers around for control and power and do the exact same thing with the other hand. Now when you're actually striking the drums, I recommend you use a combination of risks and a bit of finger there as well. So we're moving our wrist up on our fingers, come down as well. And we get a lot more power that way. Now the entire time I'm playing, I'm gripping the stick too hard or not crushing it in my hand. But I'm not letting it flap around the place. Just keep it in control and just play smoothly. If you want a bit more power from your strikes, you can't use a bit more arm. If you are using your arm mixture, It's all loose on your body is not tense when you bring up your arm and you're still using the fulcrum and the wrist and fingers to get the power and control from the stick like that. But for general playing, I recommend just using the wrist and fingers. And that's how you hold the drumsticks. Just experiment with different groups and see what works best for you. 8. Foot Technique: Let's talk about how we operate this bass drum pad or no. And yes, you are right. I've got Christmas socks on, but it is December. In this lesson, I'm going to cover two bass drum techniques, the heel down technique and the heel up technique. We'll start off with the heel down technique. In all honesty, there's not much to this technique. So what we'll do is I'll just play it for you. So as you can see, our heel is firmly planted on the pedal and we're using our ankle as a leverage point. It's a pretty simple technique and I highly recommend you start off with this one. Once again, we're just lifting our foot up and then coming back down and striking the bass drum. Now a lot of jazz players use this technique because it allows you to play very softly and you've got a lot of control in this movement. There's a couple of things you want to be aware of. Now when you first start playing this technique, it can be quite difficult because you're using the shin muscles that are not normally used. It might take a little while for these to develop, but once they are developed, you'll find that a lot easier. If you are finding your legs are quite sore and burning. That means that you're building your muscles up. Another thing is that you always want to have your fruit and contact with the foot pedal. You don't want to lift off like this. You always want to be in control of the pedal. Even when you lift off like this. You always want to be in control of the petal. You don't want to be like this where it's moving all over the place because then there's less control. So my default place where I leave my bass drum pedal is where the beater is actually in contact with the bass drum like this. And my foot is flat. That's usually where I start and I just come back down and do this. You can also play where the beater is off the head for the default position. And that is what we call playing off the head like this. You get a lot more low end from the bass drum, so it depends on what sound you want. The other technique is called burying the Beecher because our beater is buried into the head. By default. It produces a punchier sound. So here's playing off the head. Here's burying the beater. Just try both and see which one's more comfortable. Now the second technique is a bit more advanced, but it's called the heel up technique. I'll just quickly play it for you. The heel up technique uses your whole leg instead of just your shin muscles, and it produces a lot more power. And as you can see, the starting position has the heel up above the bass drum pedal. Compare that to the heel down technique. So we start off here and all we do is lift up our leg and strike the drum. What we do is we lift our knee as if it's being pulled by a string. And then we drop the knee and that comes down and we strike the bass drum pedal with the ball of our foot, and then the rest of the foot follows, and then we returned to our default position. Now like I said, you get a lot more power because you're using your entire leg. Now this movement looks and sounds very complicated. But really you just stamping on the pedal, but makes sure that you're always in contact with the foot pedal. Now that should feel like one smooth movement. It shouldn't actually feel like it's a lift the knee, drop the foot ball and then heal. It should just be like this. Now for me, this movement for some reason took a while to get, but then one day it totally clicked and I could just play it. I wish I could tell you why, but honestly, just one day I could suddenly play really well. Just practice the movement of coming up and down with your foot. When you're playing slower stuff, you don't have to have your heel constantly up like this ready to go because that will cause a lot of fatigue. You can just put it down into a nice resting position. And then once you play the bass drum, bring it up, slot the bass drum. And that's pretty much it. You lift your knee up, then drop it again with the ball, and then the heel will follow. And it's one smooth movement. I really recommend you start off with the heel down technique though. And then once you build up your shin muscles, you can move on to the heel up Technique. Ideally, you want to be able to do both. Alright, let's do a quick comparison. We'll do the heel down, burying the beater. Then we have heel down with the bass drum beats are coming off the head. Then finally we've got our heel up technique, which lends itself to burying the bitter. The left foot techniques are the exact same. You can have your heel down technique or your heel up technique. I use both of these quite often, so really just get used to both of them. In reality, you're not gonna be playing the left foot as much as the right foot. So just get used to the technique that really helps you and makes you feel most comfortable. And that's it for foot technique. 9. Getting the best sound from your drums: In this video, I want to talk about how you can get the best sound at your drums and also your symbols. And more importantly, how to make them last longer. We'll start off with drums and then we'll move on to symbols. I promise you this information is really valuable. Let's get into it. I know what you're thinking. Why do I need to be taught how to hit a drum? It's pretty simple. You just whack it. I mean, you aren't just whacking the drum, but there is things you can do to get the most out of the drum. The first of these things is to always try to hit the center of the drum. The closer you strike the center of the drum, the more focused the sound is going to be when you're playing pretty normal stuff, just aim for the center of the drum. If you want to explore the different sounds and the drama, then absolutely move around and see what happens. But for normal playing, aim for the center. When you're playing the drums, you want to be quite consistent with your playing. So you want to hit that center every time. That way you'll get a much more consistent professional sound. All right, let me just compare. How would the drum sounds when you hit it in the center and off-center? As you can here, when I hit the center, It's really cool. It's really focused. But when I moved to the edge, it's a bit more papery. So they were thin sounding. So my first tip is try to hit the center of the drum. The second thing I want to talk about when you're playing the drum is that you don't want to leave your stick on the head because that will choke the dropout completely. What you wanna do is strike the drum and let the stick bounce off and let the head resonate. The reason I picked the floor tom is because it's very noticeable in the larger towns. So here's what happens when I leave the stick on the head. Let's compare that to when I let the stick bends off the head. Hopefully you can really notice that choking that drum head really kills the sound. Not only that though, but when I strike the drum and choke the header like that, the vibration transfers into my hand and it can cause injuries and fatigue. Talking the drama is a common symptom when you're gripping your stick too hard. So if that is happening, just loosen your grip. I make sure that the stick is bouncing off the head. Let's move on to symbols, right? I know what you're thinking. You probably thinking ruin, these are symbols, just hit them and then Bob's your uncle. But there's a bit more to it because you can break these quite easily if you don't know your proper technique. Trust me, when I say this, I wish I'd learned about this technique a lot sooner because I would have saved me a lot of symbols. Alright, let's get into it. Now. You might just think symbol, Let's just hit it. And you might just want to go smash right down like this. So taking your stick and just hitting the edge of the symbol at that. But that is a big no-no. What might happen when you bring your stick straight and then the symbol like that is that all your energy is concentrated into that one part of the symbol. So the entire symbol takes that energy hit there. And what that can do is crack the symbol, so don't hit it straight down like this. You might end up with a crack symbol. And to be honest, quite a few symbols that way. Instead, what I recommend you do, instead of just going straight down like that, is actually go slightly across the symbol. So you're kinda glancing the edge of the symbol at that. What that's gonna do is it's going to disperse that energy between the symbol and it's gonna be less likely to crack. So going down like that, not ideal because that's going to take all the energy in one place. But glancing is gonna be a lot better. So let this, as you can see, the symbols rotating a bit more. So that means that energy is being dispersed equally. I really want you to learn about that a lot sooner. Let's do that one more time. It's almost like a side swipe, but if you get used to that technique is gonna be a lot better for your symbols. That's why it also helps to have your assembled slightly tilted towards you because then you can glance it a lot easier. But yeah, that's how you keep your symbols and tip-top condition and you don't crack them. It's easy to replace a drum head, but replacing symbols is a lot more expensive, so just treat them properly and hit them correctly. And these will last a lifetime. 10. Notation Basics 1: Okay, here we are with a blank piece of music, although as you can see, it isn't really blank. What we have here is five lines, and this is what we call the staff. This is the basis for all written music. The staff is where we put all the nodes. We can put notes on both the lines and the gaps between the lines. We can also put notes further up and further down the five lines, but most of the music is contained within these five lines. Traditionally, if I were to put notes, lord dynamin staff, they would represent lower pitches and higher notes, higher pitches. But we're drums. We don't really have a tuned instrument with pitches. So not some different parts of the staff represent different parts of the drum kit. I'll provide you with a legend which tells you the standard drug notation as a reference. But you don't need to know it all yet. The way we read the music is similar to a book. We read left to right. When we reached the end of the staff or the page, we just continued down to the next one below and so on, just like the lens of a book. So now we know how the staff works. Let's look at the concept of bars. Bars are what we use to break down long pieces of music into bite-size chunks. A bar is a segment of time in the music that represents a certain number of beats. The number of beats in the bar is decided by the time signature, but we'll come to that in a bit. So here's a piece of music. Notice all of these lines through the music. These are called bar lines, and this is what we use to show separate bars, each one of these segments and the music is A-bar. These bars make things much more structured and easy to read. Bars are used to break down music to be more manageable. Can you imagine reading this music without the bar lines? It would be so much more difficult to keep replace. The other great thing about Barnes's that we can number them so we can easily find our place in a bit of music quickly. For example, your guitarists might say, let's start the song, but we'll do it from Bari instead of bar one. We can quickly look at the music, find bar eight, and we're literally on the same page about things and we know what to play and where to start. So it's just a great way to quickly find your place in the sheet music. Eventually, as you play more, you will internalize the idea of bars and it will come as second nature to you. These are simply the building blocks of music and they just give you the structure of a song. So bars are incredibly important, but what's more important is the time signature. A time signature sets the boundaries for the barn, sets the rules and tells us how many beats are in each bar. But before I go into the details of time signatures, I want to talk about naught values. Every musical note has a value or duration. The duration or value of a naught is counted in beats. The most basic naught value is a quarter note. This is what a quarter note looks like. This will be your bread and butter as a drummer, and it's what you're used to count things. A quarter notes duration is just one beat. We current quarter notes by just simply counting up numbers. So 1234, etc. So every TPR I mentioned them on that keeps time for us. We can count up in time with the metronome. This is because the metro most pulsing on every quarter note. So the quarter note is your reference to all of the note values. We will look at other node values in a bit. But for now, just get used to the idea that the quaternary is one beat flowing. So now we know about the quarter note which lasts one beat. We can now return to time signatures. As I said, Time signatures tell us how many beats are in a bar, times in interests go at the start of the music and our retinas two numbers. The one we will look at first is the most popular time signature of all. 4444 is used in most modern music, from pop to dance, to rock, funk, et cetera. It's the easiest to dance to, and it's also the nicest to listen to, as it's a nice even number. But what do these numbers mean? Let's look at the top number first. The top number tells us how many beats are in the bar. So before four, we can tell that there's four beats in the bar. The bottom number tells you what the note value with the beat is. If it's a fourth, the quarter note as the beat. A good way to remember this is if you look at the time signature, make it into a fraction and meet the top number one, we have a quarter, which is equal to a quarter note. You don't have to worry about the bottom number too much. Just focus on that top number representing how many pizza in a bar. So now we know how much we can fit in a bar of 44. Let's fill up these four bars with music. So what we have here is four bars of music with four quarter notes in each bar. So now we've got a structure of four bars with four quarter notes in each of these bars. We don't have to count up just by every number. So going 1234567, etc, cutting all the way up. We can now just count to four. So if we look at these bars, we can just count it as 12341234 and so on. So using time signatures and bars, we only ever have to count to four. Let's do a simple counting exercise now. We'll put the metronome on and will clap these four bars out, while also counting aloud, will get two bars of counting. And then we'll join in ourselves. Here we go. 1234123444 isn't the only time signature free for contains three quarter notes in a bar. 54 contains 54 nodes in a bar, and so on. Theoretically, there's no limit to how many beats you can put in a bar, but there's only a few common time signatures that you need to know about, and 44 is the main one. The only other concept I want to mention before we wrap up is tempo. Tempo is simply the speed in which became Beats. We count temple in beats per minute. So slow songs have a low tempo and a low BPM. And fast songs have a fast tempo and a fast BPM. Alright, To summarize, we put music on the staff and read left to right where the node is on the staff tells us what part of the drum kit to play. We use bars to help organize music and time signatures to tell us how many beats are in the bar. The quarter note lasts for one beat. So a bar of 44 contains four quarter notes in it. And we count this by going 1234123 before we can use a metronome to keep ourselves some time and help us count. And we can clap along and came with it. Increasing the temple simply increases the speed of the count. So a slow song has a slow tempo and a fast song has a fast tempo. Oh man, we have just done a crash course in music notation. It's a lot to take in, so feel free to pause, take a break, and let the information digest. If you're ever struggling, just come back to this video and come back the next video. And hopefully, the more you read it and the more you watch this video and do things for yourself, the more you'll be in tune and understand the idea of music notation. Next time we'll be looking at eighth notes and rests. 11. Notation Basics 2: Cool. We now know how to count and play quarter notes, which is excellent. However, what if you don't want to play every quarter note in bar enter rests. Rests are similar to musical notes, apart from instead of telling the musician to play a note, to tell him not to play, rests like normal notes have a value. The first of which we're going to look at is the quarter note rest. It holds the same value as a quarter note. It tells us that we are not to play anything for one beat. Let's look at this piece of music. As you can see, we've now added some rest her normal for four bars. When we play this music, we still count 12341234, like before. But we only play the ones that have notes. We don't play the ones that have rests. So let's give it a bash, candlelight and clap along with the music. Tea bars of Canton and mirror off 12341234123 x. When there are more examples for you to clap and kinda long to in the downloads, remember to always use a metronome so you know exactly when you're in time. And that is how we use quarter notes and quarter rests. Don't buy excited though. Well, let's step it up a bit and talk about eighth notes. Eighth notes, or the next level down from the quarter note. As you can see, they have a tail, unlike the quarter note, eighth notes up a value of half a beat, so they have half the duration of coordinates. Therefore, we can fit two into each beat. Chant this bar of 448 as the value of an eighth note only takes up half a beat rather than a full beat. We need eight of them rather than for to fill in the full bar. Hence the name ethanol. We can write it early this, but what we usually do to make things easier to read is we attach the tails of the notes in groupings of two or four to help discern each beat. If you compare the two, hopefully you can see how clear it is in the second version. A good rule when writing music is to make it as clean as possible. As people say, the less ink on the page, the easier it is to read within reason, of course. Now how do we currently thoughts while we still count the beats, you know, just let the quarter notes 1234. But as we have more notes than beats, we have to add more into it. We can't eat nuts like this. 12341. Thing to note though is the metronome is still just keeping the quarter note pulse. So we will have to count accurately to stay in time. So let's try that out. We'll look the bar a few times as usual, count and clap along. If you want. You can also tap along with both hands and a practice pad with sticks or your snare drum or with your hands in your lap. 12341234123412341234. Those are very useful note value to get comfortable with and are the basis for countless drum grooves and fills. So now we know how to use two different naught values. We can start to combine them. Let's start with a simple two-bar phrase. All we're doing is doing a bar of quarter notes and then into a bar of eighth notes. We'll look at a few times and we'll do the usual 2-bar Kente. And again, counter load. 1234123412341234123412341234. Now let's start looking at individual bars and how we can make them more interesting with different types of note values. One, 234123412341234234123412341234123412. And for a good tip to help with timekeeping as to Kent and the highest note value in the piece. What does that mean? Well, in this case, the highest note value is eighth notes. So even when we're playing just quarter notes, we can still count the eighth nodes. For example, 12341241234. And if you find that easier than feel free to count that way, going through these exercises will help you understand the relationships between these null values and deepen your knowledge of a rhythm in a huge way. Let's do a few more, but let's add some quarter note rest in there. 1234123412341234123412341234123 or 12341234. Excellent job. You may not realize it yet, but what you're actually doing is you're learning a brand new language. You're already looking at a bit of music, analyzing it, and eventually you're playing it, which is really awesome, so well done so far. To round up our music theory foundations, Let's look at eighth note rest. Just like eighth notes, these last half a beat. We again just count these as 1234. Let's do a few counting and planning exercises that implement these eighth note rests 1234, 1241234123412341234124123412341234. And finally, let's do a few that combined everything we know so far. 12341234123412341234123412341212341234. The last thing I want to mention that is unique about the drugs is they don't have a duration. If I play these two bars and piano, which has the ability to sustain a note, they sound different. This is because in the first part I'm holding the note for the full quarter note. And then the second bar, I'm stopping the note with the rests on the ends. However, if I play these two bars in the snare drum and bass sound identical. That's because I can't sustain a single note and the drum. If we stick to the rule of wanting less ink on the page to make things easier to read. We'd probably go for the first option. The second option is still sounds the same. What I'm getting at is that there might be multiple ways to write things down, but always go for the one that makes the most sense. And it's the most simple to read and translates the easiest. One very, very last thing I want to talk about though, is whole notes and half notes. Whole notes and half notes are a couple of different naught values that are sometimes used in drumming, but not a lot. A whole note, it takes up a whole bar of 44. So it's four beats long. Half-note takes up half a bar of 44, therefore, it is two beats long. They have quite a distinctive loop with their whole bodies. We also have whole naught and half-note rests. These can be quite hard to differentiate from each other. A nice way to differentiate between the whole north and half-note rest is to think of them both as a postman stuck in a tree with a dog barking underneath it. The porcelain that represents the whole note rest has his legs dangling down. As you can see, we can imagine the dog is gonna be barking up that tree all day. Hence a whole note. Compare that to the postman that represents the half-note rest. His legs are above the line, so the dogs only gonna be there half the day is gonna get bored. It's a bit of a weird way to remember, but it really worked with me for some reason. The rectangle that's dangling down is a whole note rest that lasts four beats. And the rectangle that is above the line is the half note rest at last two beats long. You won't come across these naught values as much, but just be aware of them. And that's the very final thing I wanted to mention. Alright, that is the full crash course in music theory done. As always, they're supplementary exercises for you to practice with and hone in on the timing and counting. Although I'm sure by now you're just thinking, Shut up and let's play some drums. But I promise you, having that base knowledge is going to speed up your learning process tenfold and allow you to truly understand what's going on when you're playing the drums. So the next video we're going to be actually getting buried in the kit and learning are fresh beat. 12. Your First Groove: Okay, so we know how to play quarter notes and eighth notes and how to count them. We also know how to read bars and beats. So we're ready to play some drums and learn our first drum groove. So what is a drum groove? Well, a drum groove is just a repeated pattern that our drummer plays for our song. And it just keeps the backbone and the foundation of a song going. And it's really the most important thing a drummer can do. If you listen to the drums are more songs, you'll hear that they're just playing a repeat pattern and that is your groove. So there's a lot of groups that you can learn, but we're going to focus on one just now. And it is the most important group that you can learn is the group that every drummer learns to begin with. And it is so versatile and useful that I still play today in my function banned in my rock band. You know, it's so versatile and that's why it is so good. The best part is it's very easy to learn. So let's get into it. Shall we? This group is in 44 time n is one bar long. And the first thing we're gonna do is take our right hand up to the high hat and we're just going to play eighth notes for the entire bar. So eight notes, as we know, are counted as 12341234. So just play that on the hi-hat. And that is our foundation for the group that is staying constant for the whole groove. So here's a quick example of that. The metronome was just putting quarter-note pulses, so it's going 1234 and we're playing H naught hi-hat, so we're going 12341234. And when you're playing this, the one thing you want to make sure is that you're nice and relaxed. You've got good posture. And also the grouping and the spacing between these notes is very equal. So you're not going 1234, but you're just going in a nice relaxed fashion. 1234. And the second thing you want to make sure that you're doing is keeping that left foot nice and firmly planted on the hi-hat pedal. And that's gonna give you a nice tight hi-hat sound that's going to keep your groove sounding great. So just try that and just keep looping that bar with a metronome and once you're comfortable, we'll move on. So what we're gonna do next is add our left hand on the snare drum and that's coming on the two and the four. So we're keeping that right hand going just constant. H-naught is on the right hand. But we're going to add the left hand on the snare drum on 24. And when you're playing that right hand and the higher and the left hand and the snare at the same time makes sure the coming down and hitting the surfaces at the same time. And that's going to give you a nice tight sound ticket, really, really stored. You're struggling. So we're very close to finishing the grid if you just got to add the bass drum now. And what we're gonna do is we're going to play the bass drum on the one and the three. So we've got the snare on the two and the four, and we've got the bass drum on the one and the three. So I'll give you a quick example and we're going to take away the left hand for now. So you can just focus on plane that right hand with the hi-hat and the right foot with the bass drum. And again, when you're playing the hi-hat and the bass drum together, makes sure that coming down at the same time. The next thing we're gonna do to build up the coordination and play this groove is we're going to take away the right hand on the hi-hat and just leave ourself with the bass drum and the snare drum. And as you'll notice, we're not playing eighth notes anymore because we're actually just playing the bass drum on the one. Snare drum on the to, the bass drum on the free, and the snare drum on the four. So it becomes a quotient or groove again. And that shows you the relationship of the bass drum and the snare drum. They're just playing quarter notes, and it's the right-hand that keeps those eighth notes going. You can actually play that groove to do I want to know by Arctic Monkeys. So if you want to immediately play some music, have a go at that and it gives you a bit of context. So the final thing we wanna do is we want to combine the right-hand playing eighth notes, the bass drum playing the one and the three, and the snare drum that plays the two and the four. Let me just go to add them together and we get our full drum groove. So here we go are very slow tempo. And that is your first drum groove in the bag. Remember it's going to take a while to get used to the coordination to so don't get frustrated. If you can't get it immediately. I can only play it because I've been playing for ten plus years. But if you just take your time and take it very, very slowly, even if you're just going one, two, and bass and snare. And there's nothing wrong with going that slow. So it really, the important thing is to make sure that you're in time and you're playing the things together and it's sounding good. And finally, let's speed up the gribble wee bit. What I'll do is I'll play the field groove and then I'll start to take things out so you can see the relationship on here, the relationship of all the different parts. The way I like to think of this group is I like to think of the higher as the driving force keeping everything in time. The bass drums are nice kind of thought. And you've got that snare drum coming into the back beat. The backbeat just refers to playing the snare drum on the two and the four. And you will hear in most modern pop music and rock music, etc. So once you're happy with that basic grave, what we can do to embellish it is we can actually replace that first hi-hat on the first beat of the bar with a crash cymbal. So instead of just going 1234 and all in the hierarchy, we can go crash and 234. And that adds another little kind of, I guess, interesting part to the group to make it a bit less repetitive. So there you go. That is the field drum groove. It's not too complicated once you get the coordination down. And the best part is you can actually start to play music immediately with just that drum groove. I'll give you guys a bunch of songs that you can immediately play with this simple drum groove. And that means that you're actually putting this into practice and it's not just playing by yourself. You can put on some Billie Jean Bye Michael Jackson, ac-dc. And in pop song or dance on Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, all that stuff. You'll hear a rock groove playing. So enjoy it. I'll see you in the next lesson. See you there. 13. Your First Fills: Alright guys, you learned your first drum groove, which is awesome. Now let's get some drum fills. So what our drum fills? Well, drum fills are kind of just rhythmic phrases that we use to break up the groove. So it's not so monotonous. We often use fills to bring in new parts of the music or the song. So we might put a fill just before the chorus from the verse, or may do I feel after the course into the second verse, et cetera. So they're just ways of breaking up the music and add a bit more excitement and variety into the drumming. So I'm going to show you a few fields that you can use to get you started. And then you can start to build up your own refills as well. So good bit of homework that you can do before you start doing these fills is this little exercise that I've got for you. So it's just two bars of eighth notes. And the first bar of eighth notes were playing all the eighth notes without a right hand. The second bar of music is just, we're alternating right hand and left hand on the eighth notes. If you can get that transition from just the right hand to both hands playing eighth notes. Nice, those are gonna be a lot easier. The first field is very simple. It's just a bar of eighth notes, and we're just playing right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. And we're just putting that on the snare drum for all of these fellas, it's just gonna be a buyer of eighth notes. And it's just gonna be right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. The only differences we're going to change where those hands go on the drum kit. So what I'll do is I'll play a bar of the group and then I'll do the fill, bar, groove, fill, etc. So that is the first row. Not very exciting, but it is still something I use all the time in kind of slow pop and still rock chins. A variety of this village. You can add a crash cymbal on that first beat of the group after the fill. And that gives you a bit of excitement and energy. And it makes the film can stand out a bit more. The second fill I've got for you is replaying two on the snare to on the first time, t On the second term, and two on the floor tom sort of go and snare, snare tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom. And again, we're just doing right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. So these are the terms on sheet music. What I'll do is I'll color-code them just for now so you can get used to the notation. As we go on though I'm going to lose the color coordination is just to get started for now. So too in this near to the first term to second term to the floor. And again, what we can do is we can add that crash at the end of the film, back into the groove. And it's going to add that excitement and kind of explosive sound into the drum fill. So those are two things to get you started that are great. But what I recommend that you start to mess around for yourself. So what I'm going to show you is a little extra of me improvising with that same hand pattern of right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. As eighth notes. And I'm just moving around in the kit. So I might do for and the snare drum to and the second term and then two on the floor tom. As long as it adds up to eight, You're good. Yeah, it's totally improvised, is totally made up on the spot. So some of them might not work, some of them will work. It's totally subjective. So if it sounds good to you, it sounds good. So that's totally improvised and it's just using that same hand pattern and we're just moving around the kit. So have fun and try that for yourself. I really recommend it because these two fields are great, but it's really about experimenting for yourself and finding your own fields and using them for yourself. I think that's much more rewarding and writing your own drum fills that way. All right guys, just one more thing I want to show you in this lesson. I just want to show you a cool exercise that builds up floor behind the drum kit, especially when you're doing those drum fills up and down the kit. So when you start drumming that movement of light moving up and down the drum kit is probably not familiar to your body. So it's kinda stiff and it might be a bit difficult. This exercise is just going to limbered up on can I build up that muscle memory of moving up and down the k? And then overall you're gonna be a much more smooth drummer. And it's going to help your posture and it's going to make it a lot more comfortable to play these fills. So this exercise is two bars long and it's just eight months as usual. And the sticking is just right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, et cetera. Repeating. And what we do is we put this snare drum twice, the first home twice the second song twice before Tom twice. That's our first bar. And then we go back up the kits. If you go for Tom twice, second term twice, first tone twice, and then snare drum twice. And we just looped those two bars. And that's gonna get you moving around the drum kit. And it's gonna get you warmed up. And it's going to get you a lot more limber and feeling a lot more comfortable behind the kit. But that just about wraps up the lesson. Go and have some fun with this drum fills and come up with your own. 14. Groove Variations Bass Drum: Alright guys, in the last lesson, we learned a few drum fills, but by now you're probably bored of playing that same old rock groove. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a really simple but effective tool that I use for coming up with new groups is called the grid system. And if you go into the resources for the lesson, there'll be a download for the Workbook. You'll need that for this lesson. The grid system is very simple. It looks very complicated if you go through the work, but you're probably like, Oh my God, there's so much going on, but it's very simple. Once you actually break it down, what we've got going on it is just columns and rows. We've got rows of just the different parts of the drum kit. We've got the hi-hat, snare drum and the bass drum. And then the columns just represent each eighth note of a bar. So what we've got is just a bar of music, but it's in grid format. So each of these squares represents an eighth note in the grid. What we do is we line up and play the parts that have little symbols in them. So as you can see in the top row, we've got hi-hats playing every eighth note at the bar. And then we've got the snare drum on the two and the four. So those two rows stay consistent for every example. So if we just play those two rows by themselves, we just get this simple pattern. That hand parents stays the exact same. What we're changing for this lesson is the bass drum notes and where they place in the bar. So all you have to look at in these examples is where that dot goes in the bass drum grid. So essentially this grid system is just like sheet music, but it just breaks it down and you can actually see where things line up. And it's a bit more simple to understand. Hopefully, for every example on the worksheet, I've also got the sheet music so you can see how it translates from the grid to actual sheet music. Hopefully it makes sense. And what I'm gonna do now is just going to play through all these examples for you. I'm playing these examples. You might see a little speaker come up with a little song coming out as well. And that's just me showing you some of the songs that you can play these groups to organize sound pretty similar to the song. It might not be the same group for the entire song, but it should give you enough tick in a jam along to the song. Anyway, here's all the examples of code view. Go ahead and practice them. If it's too fast at a 100 BPM, which the temple I was playing. Just reading it back away and just focus on control and accuracy rather than speed. One thing you're going to hear me say a lot in this course is that to take it slow is actually better than taking it fast because taking it slow builds up that control and accuracy. And from that control and accuracy, you're gonna be able to play fast later on. Those are all the one-bar grooves. And as you'll notice in the worksheet, There's lots of blank spaces for you to come up with your own groups. So this is where the interesting fun part of the grid system comes in. What you can do is you can just put in some dots with the bass drums. And then you could actually play these groups. It's a very simple but effective composition tool that you can use to build up your own groups. So definitely check that out. And I really recommend you try and come up with your own groups for yourself. It'll be a much more rewarding experience. And obviously you've got all the examples to get you started. But I've also left a lot of blanks for you. That's much more important. Yeah, one-bar groups are great, but sometimes it can be a bit repetitive and get very boring very quickly. So what you can do to prevent this from happening is you can actually do 2-bar blocks of groove. So you've got a groove that's going on. It takes up two bars rather than the one. So it's less repetitive and it's a bit more exciting to play, just like the one-bar exercise. If you've got grids for two bars to make it easier to reach for these two-bar phrases of actually highlighted the first beat of every bar as a gray column. So you can actually differentiate the bars in the grid system. And again, the sheet music just below so you can actually see how it looks and translates onto sheet music. Once again, I'll go through all the examples and there will be song recommendations again. And again. There's lots of blank examples that you can fill in and come up with your own bass drum patterns and hopefully come up with some cool grooves for yourself. Be at that is the grid system. It's very simple. It's just basically the seat music, but you can fill it in. It's not as overwhelming as having all the lines and the staff is just three things that hi-hat, snare and bass drum. And we're just changing the bass drum. Next time we're doing the exact same thing with the grid system, but we're gonna be looking at the snare drum this time. So we can come up with some interesting groups that we instead have some fun with that download the worksheet. And if you come up with some groups for yourself, send me them. I'd love to hear them because honestly there's loads of possibilities with these grids. So looking forward to hearing from you, Take care. 15. Groove Variations Snare Drum: So just like the previous lesson, we're gonna be looking at the grid system, but instead of the bass drum, we're going to be actually changing the snare drum. So it's the exact same process we learnt in the previous lesson. All we're doing is we're keeping the bass drum on the one hand, the free of the bar. And we're just changing the snare drum about. So once again, there is a workbook that you should download and it'll have all the examples with the sheet music and the grid systems are there for you. So like I said, the base group, what we're doing is just hi-hats every eighth note in the bar and the bass drum on the one and the three, which sounds like this. Now be our baseline group that we can then understand drops to. Once again, I'll play through all the one-bar examples for you. And once again, like last lesson, that are blank slates for you to add your own snare drum variations to. Again, this is a great tool to come up with some interesting groups. So that was all the one-bar examples, but we've also got some 2-bar examples too. So let's go through all them. Once again, though, the blank grids that you can fill out an agile and snare drums to know by now from this lesson and the previous lesson, you're probably overwhelmed by all the groups I've just shown you. That's understandable. I'm not expecting to learn them all at the same time for this in the last lesson, I just wanted to show you how all the different examples sound from the workbook. If there's one or two groups that were really struggling with, don't worry about it too much, just go past it and just come back to at a later time. These two lessons are just showing you how you can use the grid system to come up with your own groups. Now of course you can go for every example and that's only going to do you get, the more groups you play, the more comfortable you're going to be playing with all these different kind of hand patterns and fit patterns. So absolutely, if you are keen on learning how to agree with more, than go through all the examples. All I'm seeing is I've really chucked in the deep end here. So don't get frustrated with yourself if you're really struggling, just take it slow, learner, beat by beat or eighth note by a thought. And you'll eventually get there. And always make sure to play with the metronome. Once you are comfortable with all of these exercises though, you can take up to the next level. What you can then do if you're feeling brave is you can take some of the bass drum patterns from the previous lesson and some of the snare drum parents and put them together to create a much more complex groove. Fair warning though, this will be quite difficult when you begin, but actually do it more and more and more. It'll become much more natural and eventually you won't have to think about it too much. If you look at the bottom of the work, but there's some blank slates that have blank bass drums and blank snare jumps. So you just kind of keeping that going. And then the rest is up to you to come up with some cool, interesting sounding groups. Working on these groups and making your own groups. It's gonna be great for coordination and compositional skills. And it's also going to help you understand how eighth notes work. There are some examples for you to look at as well, of combining the bass drum patterns and the snare drum patterns. And I'll just play through them, just know. Alright, that was a lot of examples for you to get stuck into. So go ahead and take a break, go on your drum kit and start playing these grooves. Print out the worksheets, come up with your own stuff and have some fun. See if you can listen to some of your favorite songs. And that worker, if they're playing an eighth note groove and maybe you can actually transcribe it, which means write out the drum part and into that grid system. And then that's a great way to learn how to play these groups. Alright, that just about wraps up the lesson. Next time we're gonna be looking at some interesting, more complex fill ideas. 16. Fill Variations Combining 1 4 and 1 8th Notes: Okay, by now hopefully you've got a good grasp on how groups work and how we can use them. And hopefully you've come up with your own groups. But now let's come back to some drum fills. So all we've done so far with drum fills is we've done the, you know, the, the bar of eighth notes 1234, which is great, but again, with the same groove, it can just get a bit boring. What I want to do in this lesson is just a simple concept that you can use that's going to spice up your drum fills and make them a bit more interesting to listen to. When I say simple is very simple overdoing, instead of just playing eighth notes the whole time, we can actually add quarter notes instead of eighth notes. So we just do one hit instead of the two in every beat. So instead of just a bar of 1234 and the same for the whole bar, we can mix it up and go, you know, let's say 1234. And because otherwise you're just putting the eighth note groove and then you didn't fill, it just sounds so rigid and just like 1234, it doesn't ever change. But if you add different naught values to fills, it breaks up the rhythm and we bet and makes it more interesting and not as exhausting to listen to. I've ran a few samples of some fillers and what I'll do is I'll just play through them at a slow and fast tempo, as well as changing the note values within a fill. What you can do is you can change the length of the film. Instead of being a bar long, you can change it to two beats long or freebies long wherever you want. So if it was two beats long, you'd have the group going for the first two beats, and then you'd have the fill for the other two beats in the bar. Here's a few examples of that. I really like when fills just last two beats long because then it's not so imposing and it's not so in your face. It's great for a more subtle fills. If you're thinking musically, maybe a soft song or something, you don't want a big drum fill for a full bar. Maybe just a beat or two beats will do the job and mess around with time and space to you don't have to play for every single note, you can leave some room. And in this one example, I've got a rest. And that creates a bit of tension before you come back into the groove. So mess around with that as well. Alright, Just to recap, there are two concepts I was talking about in this lesson. The first concept is just changing the note values and the fill. So it's not just constant eighth notes and just mess around with different rhythms. The second concept is changing the actual length of the film that you do. So it can be four bars long as you want, two beats long, half a beat, one beat wherever you want. The next lesson is really fun. I'm gonna be showing you a cool tool that I use is similar to the grid system, but it's for drum fills. So it's gonna be a way for you to come up with your own drum fills quickly and easily. And then you're gonna be composing your own gurus and your own skills. And that's a great start to your drumming foundation. So catch you in the next lesson. 17. Modular fill rhythms Expand your vocabulary: Alright, we've learned different ways that we can use drum fills, but I'm going to take it a step further. In this lesson, I'm gonna be showing you the modular drum fill system. It sounds very complicated, but truthfully, I just want the cool name for something that's quite simple. The modular drum fills system is just a simple way for you guys to basically write your own drum fills and played them quite quickly. Before we go any further though, I just want to say there's a worksheet in the resources. So go ahead and download that. It will make a lot more sense with that in front of you, right? So what is the system? Well, all we're doing is we're taking four basic rhythms. These are building blocks, these four rhythms. And we're just putting them together and rearranging them in different ways to come up with different rhythms. For basic rhythms are a quarter notes, a quarter note rest to eighth notes, and then an eighth note rest with an eighth note as well. So we put four of these together. We get a bar of 44 as a drum fill. As you can see from the worksheet, we've got four different blocks. In these four different blocks, you can select one of these rhythms to go inside that block. Once you filled out those four blocks, you've got yourself a bar of rhythm. That's the first stage of the system, just picking out some rhythms to go in these four blocks. The next stage is actually playing this rhythm. As you can see in the first example I've got for you, is just a simple pattern of just quarter notes and eighth notes. The next part of the system is just actually applying that to the drum kit. So all we do is we take that rhythm that we've put in the four blocks. We play that on the snare drum as a drum fill. That doesn't sound very exciting, but you can definitely use that as a drum fill. The third stage is what takes it to that next level. The third stage is where we take that rhythm from the snare drum and we actually start to move around the drum kit in different ways. This is where the system comes into its own. And that's where you can really experiment with different orchestration, where you play it on the drum kit. Here's that same drum fill that played in the snare drum. And now I'm just going to move around the drum kit in different ways. That in essence is the modular filesystem. Step one is simply using those four squares and adding one of every four rhythm options that you've got for every square. So, but then the step one, you've got a bar of rhythm. And then step two is simply taken that rhythm and then playing it on the snare drum. The second stage is really important because that's where you're actually playing that rhythm that you've just basically composed. So take your time with this ticket slow. I really feel and workout what you're gonna be playing with WeChat. Now I just want to point out a few things because you might be wondering, but yeah, but what Handel, I used to play these rhythms? Well, as a general rule, what I would do is I delete with my main hand for the quarter notes. So I'd go 1234, I'd go right, left, right, left. For the eighth notes, I'd go 1234. And so right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. And then for the one that's just the eighth note rest than the eighth notes are 123. And I'd actually play that note with the left hand. And for the quarter note rest, you're not playing anything, so it doesn't matter too much. Now that is just a general rule on which hand I'd used to play. But obviously, depending on the drum fill, it might be comfortable with different hands playing different parts. This is where you come in and you know what's more comfortable for you. Anyway, that's step two, just taking that rhythm, playing on the snare drum as a drum fill. And then obviously Step three is just moving that rhythm around the drum kit. I'll play through each example as a snare drum fill, and then I'll show you some examples of how you can move around the drum kit. And at the end of the worksheet, you've got your blanks that you can add your own rhythms with those four choices that you've got and come up with your own drum fills. But yeah, that is the modular filesystem. If you download the worksheet, explains it again so you can see how it works. Definitely take some time with this and come up with your own drum fills because that's gonna be much more rewarding than me just showing you a 100 drum fills. And then you play in them like a robot just copying me. Coming up with your own stuff is just gonna be much more creative. And it's going to get you understanding how these rhythms work together. It's also going to help you with the coordination, knowing which hand please, what, and what feels best for you. And that's going to basically develop your personal style. Eventually wants you to do this more and more, just like the grid system. You won't actually need it. You'll just be able to play these rhythms and just come up with them on the fly. But just to get you started, these systems are great. So the more you do it, the more you're gonna be familiar with these rhythms. And the more you're just going to be able to automatically play these. And combining your muscle memory from the grid system and the filesystem, you're gonna be able to play an improvised music really soon, and that's what it's all about. The next lesson, it's just gonna be a rhythm exam. When I say exam, I don't mean I'm gonna be passing or failing you. There's no grade or anything. It's just an opportunity for you to evaluate yourself and your progress. 18. Half time and double time feels: Alright guys, has a go and I just wanna do a little short video on a cool little trick that I use that totally changes the vibe of a drum groove. The nice thing is this trick is really easy to implement, but it does drastically change the sound of your drum groove. What I'm talking about is changing your normal time groove to halftime or double time. Let's take a look at a normal group that we've got so far. We've got our bass drum on the one and the three, with our eighth notes playing on the high hats the entire time. And then the important part is we've got our snare drum landing on the two and the four of the bar. Now that snare drum landing on the two and the four is what we call the backbeat. That groove is what we call a normal time group because the snare drums land on the two and the four. So we've got our normal time grooves to the backbeat slammed on the two and the four. And we've also got half-time and double time groups. All we need to do to change our normal time groove into halftime or double time is to change the placement of the bank beats to change a group of normal time to halftime, all we need to do is change the snare drum placements from the two and the four of the bar to just the three of the bar. And that gives you the illusion that you're playing half as fast, but you're not actually changing your temple. To change our normal time groove to a double time groove, all we need to do is change our placements of the snare from the two and the four to the ends of every beat. So we play our snare drums on the 1234. And he's had the double time group sounds. And that gives you the illusion that you're speeding things up. In reality though, you're not actually changing the speed of the group. You're just changing how the group feels. So normal time is the snare drums on the two and the four. Halftime is the snare drums on the three of the bar. And then double time is the ends of every beat. It really is like a rhythmic illusion. You're changing how it sounds in terms of speed, but you're not actually changing the speed. It just sounds like you're slowing down or speeding up. It's really fun to mess around with this stuff. And my personal favorite thing is to do half-time groups. I just find them so much fun. The nice thing is you can use these different fields for different musical settings. It, you've got a slow chilled out June. You might want to go to a half-time groove. If it's a normal straight down the line, rock June or pop June, maybe the normal time is good. And then if you want a really energetic sounding song, you should go for the double time to get used to these different fields. I recommend you play a couple of bars of normal time group, and then another couple of bars of double time groove, then a couple of bars or normal time groove, then a couple of bars of halftime group clinical. And just go ahead and transition from these different fields until you're comfortable in all three. And it really is a super powerful tool. And all you're doing is changing the placement of the snare drum. If you're playing along to music or you're jamming with your buddies, definitely try that trick out is a lot of fun. 19. Using Different sources for grooves: All the groups so far we've done, I've just been on the hi-hat and I just want to talk about something you can do that changes the group completely. And that is just changing the surface that you're playing that right hand on. I'm going to show you a couple of ideas that you could do that changed the groove completely without actually having to do much work apart from change from the hi-hat to a different part of the drum kit. The first thing you could do is change your right-hand play in the high hat to actually put in just the floor tom. It creates a totally different vibe and it's a bit more rock in a bit more rumbly. And it's great for as you're playing like a big heavy rock thing. Once willing to just take up all the low end and just be really low. And you can move to the hi-hat for the different parts of the song and it creates a nice contrast. Another thing you can do is move your right hand from the hi-hat up to the ride cymbal, the right symbol is my favorite symbol on the drum kit. I find it's so versatile and it's just so much fun to play the rates and was a few different sounds. You've got your normal hit in the center of the symbol. You've got your edge hit, which kinda gives it a much more crashy sound. And you've got your bell side. All right guys, I just want to show you a couple of weeks you can actually play the bell of the ride cymbal. The first way is just the normal way, which is just playing it on the tip of the stick like any other part of the drum kit, which creates a nice mellow sounding bell here so that sense. So it blends quite nicely with the rest of the symbol. And it's great for jazz stuff and more quiet stuff. And if you don't want a super loud bell, That's a great way to play it. But if you want to play more heady stuff like rock or punk or funk and stuff. Where do you want a nice defined the bell? You can take the shoulder of the stick, which is the thick part here. I'm pulling it across the ballot this or at an angle. So quite a lot, the stick is actually coming in contact with the bell and that way you get a loader more pronounced bell. If we compare the two. As you can probably hear, the second version where we're placing the shoulder on the stick, which has much more contact, is a lot louder, a lot more pronounced. And it's great for rock music. So that's just a little tip for you. Complete your group with all these different settings from the ride cymbal. So you could just play a group with just the bell symbol and just the middle of the symbol. Or you can go full crash and just use the edge of the symbol and make a big washy sound. Or you can use combinations of these. A typical example is playing eighth notes on your ride cymbal, and playing every quarter note on the bell. That crows are really cool sentence, really popular in rock music. Another variety of this is you're still playing your eighth notes on the ride cymbal. But instead of putting the bell on the 1234 and you do it on the offbeats ego 1234. And that creates a much more bouncy sound. And it's good for a funk music, pop music, rock music, all that good stuff. Finally, if you want to go full on explosive with your drum grooves, you can just go into the crash cymbal and just play your eighth notes on that. If it's a big part of the song or you want to have a massive explosion sound. That's a great thing you can do. Suggest you try them out. They're all just different flavors of the same group essentially. And as you can hear the sound completely different. And that's only by moving your right hand, the different parts of the drum kit. It really is quite a powerful thing. And you've got probably a quite a few groups learned already. So you've already got so many more versions of those groups for you to mess around with. So have some fun with that and see the next lesson. 20. Structures of a song: In this lesson, I want to talk about song structure. Despite what guitarist and singer see osteomas are musicians. Musicians of course play songs. So it goes to say that understanding how a song works is vital to that process. What we're gonna do in this lesson, let's talk about song structure and talk about the different sections in the song and their characteristics. So in general, song structure is just how a song is organized by different sections. There's a few different main sections that most songs are made out of. There's intros, there's versus there's choruses. There's pre-course is sometimes as well, and there's also bridges and then otros. Let's firstly talk about the intro. The intro is fairly self-explanatory. It's usually the introduction of a song. They can either be a drum intro or guitar intro, or the full band could just kick in at the same time, the intro is usually there to grab the listener's attention. It really is there to introduce the song. After that, we've got Vs, vs are where the main song kicks in really. Vs are there to tell the story of the song. There's usually multiple versus in a song. And lyrically, the Vs change. The verse is really there to set the scene for the chorus. So we start off with the intro, then we go into averse, and then sometimes there's a pre-chorus. The pre-course could be there to bridge the gap between the verse and the chorus, which we'll talk about in a second. The pre-chorus could be a big buildup towards the chorus, or it could be the opposite with the music goes really quiet, which makes the core stand out even more. So intro verse, sometimes a pre-course, and then you've got your chorus. The chorus is the main climax of the song. This is where all the main ideas of the song come together. And it's usually a really catchy chorus that happens multiple times throughout the song. Unlike versus the other course usually stays the same no matter how many times you player. There's sometimes it might be a double course towards the end of the song as well though. After this first course, you usually go back into the second verse. This is where things chiller again and you've usually got a second part of the story that's been told in the first verse. When I'm talking about story, lyrically, there might be subtle changes in the music compared to the first, first and the second verse. The second verse might be a bit more chill or it might be a bit more ramped up after the second verse is usually a pre-course than a chorus again. And then we usually get to a bridge. The bridge is really there to keep things interesting in the song. Because of it's just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, the entire song, it might get a bit repetitive. There might not always be a bridge though musically, the bridge is usually quite different from the verse and chorus. Like I said, the bridge is used to break up the repetition of the verse and chorus, so something new is usually introduced. The bridge is often called the Middle East as well, because it usually lasts eight bars after the bridge is usually just a chorus or a double course. And then the outro, I choose there to kinda tell the listener that the song is ending. The outro could be a big climax. It could be the opposite where it fades out. It just kinda tells the listener that the song is over. Hope you enjoyed it. So those are the main structures of assault. You've got your intro, you've got your Versus, you've got pre courses, courses, and then a bridge and then an outro. This is really just six main structures. All these different songs structures are either for 816 or 32 bars long. You might find there's a four-bar intro, or 16 bar verse than an eight bar, than an eight bar pre-chorus, and then, uh, 32 bar chorus. And that kind of stays the same for the song. But hopefully that gives you an outline about Song Structures. It's really good to learn how songs work because it means that you can contribute to ban practices, you can help break songs. It also means that if you're in a rehearsal and someone says, we'll take it from the second course, you will know exactly where that is. But yeah, go listen to some of your favorite tunes and kind of work out what parts are which my example songs fairly standard, but you've got a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. But then there might be some deviations to that. Hopefully that all made sense though. 21. Rhythm Exam 1: Hello guys, welcome to the rhythm exam. Like I said in the last lesson, this isn't really an exam. I'm not going to be testing you or making you pass a certain mark or anything. But it's more just a chance for you to evaluate your own playing and see where you're at. It's just a simple snare drum piece that you can download the sheet music in the lesson resources as usual. And basically take that away, go away and just learn it and play it for yourself. And that's your chance to really look at the music. And if you understand what's going on and you can play it. Amazing. If not, no worries. Just go back to the stuff that we've learned in this chapter. And just to help you, I'm going to play through a slow and fast tempo. Take it very slow, like around 90 BPM and bump obtain or 20 BPM at a time. Sit your golfer around a 120 bpm. Because if you can play it and you can read the music and you can understand it at that speed. That's a great start to your drumming foundations, right? So I'll play through that at 90 BPM and then a 120 BPM. Another thing you can do, if you want to add a bit of musicality to it, you can make it into a snare drum March by adding a bass drum on the quarter notes for every beat. So if you are finding it too easy with just the snare drum, we can have that bass drum and you've got your extra level of complexity there. Yeah, so download the sheet music, go off and start to play it and learn it. And once you get it to around 120 bpm, then awesome. You're ready to start the second chapter. The next chapter is awesome. It's all about getting into the meat of the whole thing. So I'm really excited to start that with you and I'll see you there. Take care. 22. 16th Notes: Let's start this new chapter off by talking about 16th notes. But firstly, let's recap. There are four quarter notes in a bar of 44. There are 8 eighth notes in a bar of 44. Can you see a trend? Well, unsurprisingly, there are 16 16th notes in the bar for, for the value of the 16th note is half that of the eighth note and a quarter of a quarter note. That means we can fit four into one beat. We can't 16th notes as follows. 1234. Let's try that out at a slow tempo. Feel free to clap along or play on the snare drum with alternating hands, starting with your left hand. 16th notes are drummers. Best friend when I played drums, I'm always thinking about the 16th note as my reference naught value. What that means is in my head, I'm always counting my beats by dividing them into 16th notes. It makes it much easier to count in a slow tempos, and it also keeps me in time when you want to switch between different null values. For example, you might be playing an eighth note groove, but then you go into a 16th note fill. Having 60 those in your head already, counting long will make it a lot easier. Getting comfortable with 16th notes is essential. Not only that though, you want to get comfortable with changing through different naught values at speed. Let's look at how we can do that with our three basic note values, the quarter and the 16th notes. This simple exercise is a good way to get used to changing naught values on the fly. Who play a bar of quarter notes, then a bar of eighth notes, then a bar of 16th notes. Then we move back in the opposite direction and play another bar weights. And then we'll finish it on a bar of corridors. And you can move back up and down this as much as you want until you're confident. And then you can start to jump from core to 16th notes and then vice versa. I recommend you can't open your practice this as it will help you when you bring this knowledge to the drum kit. The final thing I want to talk about is 16th note rests on just like all of the rest recovered, we simply count them the same way you would with a normal naught value. We just simply don't play for that duration. There is a simple 16th note rest workbook in the download. So check out. I'll play through that workbook for you now. There you go. That is 16th notes done. Next, we're going to be looking at how we can combine sixth, seventh, eighth notes together to produce more interesting patterns. 23. 16th Notes with 8th notes: We've looked at 16th notes by themselves, which is a good start. But a common thing you'll see and hear in music is the combination of eighth notes with 16th notes in a beat. In this lesson, I'll show you the most common combinations of these naught values. Let's start off with this first example. Note how the stems on the eighth floor and the 16th notes combined into one neat package. Each one of these is one beat long. Now how can we count this? Well, as I mentioned in the last lesson, a good practice is to keep sixteenths and what's going in your head the entire time, no matter what you play. And as we know, an eighth note last double the amount of time as a 16th note. So you could see an eighth note takes up to 16th notes. Using this, we can come up with the rhythm as follows. 1234. The eighth note takes up both the one and the E of the beat. And then we just play or to 16th notes, the ands and the app. So if I were to count the 16th notes out loud to a play that rhythm, we get this, 12341. This is how the rhythm sounds played out. I've set the metronome up to count 16th notes along with the beat. So if you are struggling, try that out because it does help. That's the basic concept. Then. Keep continuing to 16th notes. But when an eighth note appears, just count to 16th notes in a row before playing the next note. Let's go through a few more examples. You may notice that some of these rhythms so similar to the ones we played in the 16th note rest workbook. That's because some of them are, they are the same things written differently. However, a general rule is that we want less ink and confusing things on our sheet music. So we'd probably write the one with the eighth notes. But you should be aware that you can actually write them both ways. The more you play and read these rhythms, the more you recognize the patterns and the stems. And you'll just know immediately what it sounds like. For example, when I see these rhythms, I don't actually have to cut them out, but rather recognize the shapes and simply understand how they sound. You will be able to do the exact same thing with some practice and time. Let's not forget about eighth note rest. So here's a couple of combinations of 16th notes and eighth note rest. The concept is the exact same. Just for fun, let's see how we can use these rhythms in context to a groove. We'll get into it much more in detail in the next few lessons. But I just want to show you what you can do with these specific rhythms. What we can do is play these rhythms and the right hand on the high hats. And then we can add our basic bass drum on the one in the free, and the snare drum on two and the four. We've immediately got some interesting sending groups. I'm not as your crash course in 16th notes and done. We can now bring it to the kits and have some fun. As always though, the more you do it, the more you'll understand it. So get practicing. 24. 16th Note Grooves: Alright, now we know how to count. I'm pleased. 16th notes. Let's never apply them to some groups. The first group I've got for you is probably one of the most basic 16th note based groups. And it starts off with just playing 16th notes on the hi-hat. And we'll just play them as alternating notes as right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, et cetera. I'm a golden one knee and 234. And up the next stage, the group is just adding a bass drum on the one and the three. The final thing we need to do is just add that back beat on the two and the four on the snare drum. So for now let's take away the bass drum and just focus on the hands. Let's take it really slow. So we keep our hands on the hi-hat. But for that snare drum here, we're just taking our right hand and moving it down to the snare drum, the twos and the fours, 311234. And so all we need to do is just keep playing those 16th notes and we just move her hand down on the backbeat. So I'll play that really slows. You can see exactly what's happening with that hand. And all we need to do now is just add that bass drum back in and we've got our 16th note groove. This is a great group for funk music, disco music, even rock music and dance music. It's really versatile and it creates a cool driving force for those hi-hats. The next group is very similar overdoing, instead of just doing the bass drum and the one and the three were doing it on 1234. So we've got a driving, pumping bass drum on every quarter note. And that really helps to hammer home that disco dance vibe. Having the bass drum play on each quarter note of a 44 bar is something called four on the floor. It just means that we're playing that bass drum on each quarter note. So if you ever hear musicians are drivers talk about foreign floor and just means they're playing the bass drum on every quarter notes. Once you've got that basic 16th coordination with the hi-hat and the snare and the bass drum, we can start to mess around with different snare drum and bass drum variations. So here's a couple of beats from variations. This won't be too hard. Remember to line up with the bass drum on the right hand when you're playing those hi-hats. Here's some snare drum variations. These are a bit more difficult because you're gonna be putting those 16th and the hi-hat be also gonna be bringing it down for different parts onto the snare drum. So all we're doing for the snare drum variations is we're keeping that same hand pattern, but we're just moving different parts down to the snare drum. So we're going, we're just keeping that going. And then we'll put the snare here. Or we can use the left hand, bring that down to the snare and really have some fun with it. So I'll show you a couple of examples. And then I'll show you an improvisation where I'm just keeping that same 16th note hand pattern and I'm just moving it at different points in the snare drum. This will take a bit of time to get used to and get that movement flowing nicely. Really take it slow and just get used to moving that right hand from the hi-hat, dented the snare drum. And the same thing with the left hand. I find the left hands a bit more difficult because you have to maneuver between the other hand. You're going to have to go underneath it. But if you take it really slow, it will eventually get used to the movement. And you can also bring your other right handout to give yourself a bit more room. The main thing to practice is just get those 16th notes and the hi-hat really nice and even and make sure you're getting that nice back between the two in the fall with that basic groove. Once you're happy with that buildup and add some more bass drums and snare drums as you want. The final thing in this lesson I want to show you is that you don't have to use both hands for 16th notes and the hi-hat. If you want to have a cool font group, that's an a slow tempo, you can just use the right hand for those 16th notes and it creates a cool vibe case, a different fuel when you're playing it. And you just want to kind of lay back and groove we bit more because it's 16 with both hands is more rocky and dancing with the one hand. If you're doing a slow tempo, it just creates a nice cannot waive that. You want to just sit back in the pocket and just groove away. So I recommend you practice both the 16th notes and the high out with both hands and just the one hand as well. And really focus on just getting those 16th notes even and sounding good. 25. 16th Note Fills: Alright, now we know some 16th known groups. Let's look at some 16th look fills that just like the groups, we're gonna be incorporating those into our fills. Just like those 16th notes and the hi-hat, we're just going to play them as right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, alternating strokes. The first fill I've got for you is the most simple, basic fill and it's the one that you hear all the time being played. Were student for strokes on the snare drum, for strokes in the first term, four strokes in the second term, and then four strokes on the floor, tom. And as we know, it takes four semiquavers to make up one beat. So we play one on each of these four different things that we have on one knee, on the snare to be under the first term, three E and a, and the third term. And then finally, you guessed it for eight and on the floor tom. And just like the other fields we were doing, we do have to do a whole bar drum fill. We can even just do one beats worthless drama filled. So if you're playing that one beat a semiquavers, that's just the four notes, right, left, right, left. And we can play that wherever. Here's an example. This isn't the snare drum. We can play that as an ethyl group fell or as a 16th note grid fill essentially the cool with that 16th note hi-hat groove as well. That's a great field that drummers use all the time. It's really simple and it's not too in your face. And because of that, you can slip into groups and songs and it's not overwhelming and it's going to take away from the salt. We can be that simple pattern to beat song if you want. What we can do to make these feels a bit more interesting rhythmically is we can substitute these four semiquavers for 2 eighth notes. The first example I've got for you is for each semiquavers, so one Neander, and then to eighth notes, two and then four semiquavers again, three. And then finally to eighth notes for the rhythm is just one knee under 234. And here's how it sounds. If you move around the kit. Here's another combination where I've put two beats of eighth notes together and then two beats of semiquavers together. So that sounds like 1234123 E and a 40. And obviously you don't have to play that block of four semiquavers on the one Tom or the one snare, or wherever. It can move it around in different parts. So for example, in this film, I'm doing two on each term. And it sounds great. The final fill I've got for you is a very similar thing where I'm just doing two semiquavers in each drum and it takes up two beats. That says very complicated, so I'm just gonna play it for you. Now you should play at least feels very slow. But as you get faster at, you might notice that when you're playing this fills and your Andy on the floor tom is quite hard to get back into the groove over on the other side of the kit on the high hats. The best way I think about it is when you're playing that Phil and you hit your final right-hand stroke, that's when you start to move over that hand, back over to the hi-hat. And then you do your final lift stroke. And then you, that's when you basically follow the hand round and you're back to the normal plate in position. A little exercise you can do to help yourself move up and down. The kit is where you do four on the snare for the first time, for the second term, and then four on the floor tone, I injured the exact same thing working your way back up. So you do four on the floor, tom, four on the second term for the first time, then foreign the snare drum, and then you're back to the start of the little exercise. It's similar to the exercise I showed you in the first chapter of the East and what's, but now we're doing it as semiquavers, so it's a bit bit more involved. You know, you didn't for an HP and you've got to move a bit faster. As always, take this feels very slow. Once you get used to the control of the hands and the movement and the counting of semiquavers, you will start to speed up naturally playing it slow. Getting that muscle memory means that you'll be able to play it faster and much quicker. When you're practicing. These fellows feel free to use a 16th note groove and then do the fill. Or you can do an eighth note groove and then do the fill, or do both. Have some fun with those skills though, I'll see you in the next lesson. See you there. 26. Modular fill rhythms part 2 Expand your vocabulary: Welcome back to the second modular drum fill lesson. Now the concepts are the exact same as the previous modular drum lesson. We've got our worksheet you should download, and it's basically the same thing. Apart from that, we've now got 16th notes to work with. In the first modular lesson, we had four rhythms to play with. We've now got 11. That's because we've got our 16th notes to play with, and they have four notes per beat. So we can do different combinations and combine that with eighth notes. And we've got 11 total rhythms. There are more, but I thought 11 was enough for now. Here's a couple more, but these are the main ones. Like I said, this is very similar to the first lesson. We've just got more rhythms to play with. If you can't remember, the modular system is really simple. So you've got your 11 rhythms that you can choose from. Each of these lasts one beat. And as you can see in the worksheet, we've got four blank squares. All we do is pick some rhythms, put one in each box, and then that box of rhythm equates to one bar of drum fill. What I'll do now is just play through each of these rhythms that you have to choose from. I wouldn't include the quarter note rest because that is just silence anyway. You might notice in the selection of the Latin rhythms that I've actually included some sticking. Now that's the recommended sticking. It might not work for every drum fill, but if you follow that sticking, you might end up wanting to do something else. And if it feels more natural to do that, absolutely go for it. As you can see in the worksheet, I've got some examples for you. So what I'll do is I'll play them on the snare drum, slow and fast tempo. And then I'll start to move it around the kit in different ways. These are all improvised, so some of them might not work. Some of them might sound better than others. But that's all part of the fun. You get to experiment and try things for yourself. And there you go. That's a few examples to get you started. That's just to get you started though. So I recommend you actually go off and come up with your own stuff. Just pick and choose some rhythms. It doesn't have to be specific rhythms. Just put anything together. You'll come up with an interesting field that you might not have played out otherwise. Anyway, I hope you have some fun with that and I'd love to see your videos and fills. Let me know and until next time, take care. Bye. 27. Using the left foot in grooves: The left foot is something that we've not really talked about so far when you're playing the drums, the left foot is often neglected. A lot of people don't really use it that much, but I believe it's a really valuable tool for timekeeping and expression. There's lot of things you can do with it. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a few different exercises that you can do to build up that left foot strength and control. And once we're done with those exercises, I'm going to show you how you can implement the left foot into groups to make it a bit more interesting. Not only does it keep things interesting when you're moving along, It's also a great timekeeper. You'll see a lot of drummers when they play. They've got that left foot tapping away. And that's not for a musical purpose, usually, it's usually for timekeeping purpose. For example, Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He does that a lot. And I think he uses it just for timekeeping. So in my humble opinion, developing that left foot alongside your other limbs is going to allow you to be a better drummer. So in this entire lesson, we've got three different variants of a hi-hat patterns that were playing on the feet. The first variation is just playing quarter notes with your left foot. The second variation is playing eighth notes with your foot. The third variation is just playing the offbeats, so we're going on the ends of every beat. So 1234, the hi-hat fruit is notated with the cross at the very bottom of the staff. You'll probably notice that in these exercises, I'm using a tambourine on my hi-hat. That's purely so you can actually hear, but the hi-hats doing it just makes it a bit more audible. That's not a necessity. So for the first exercise, overdoing it's playing eighth notes on the hand. And all we do is go through those three variations of hi-hat patterns. The way I like to play these notes, it's just doing our bar of right-hand strokes, then a bar of left-hand strokes, and then two bars of alternate strokes or right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left for two bars. So I'll let you hear that example with the eighth notes circling through all the three different variations on the hi-hat. The second exercise is very similar to that. Apart from we're doing in quarter notes on the hands instead of eighth notes. And again, what we're doing is a bar of right-hand, bar of left hand and then two bars of alternate strokes. And again, all we do is play through those three variations of hi-hats. First on the every quarter note. Second version is every eighth note, and the third version is on the offbeats. The third exercise I've got for you, It's the same thing again, but we're playing 16th notes. When you're playing the 16th notes, you're just playing alternate strokes for the entire thing. You don't have to worry about doing a buyer of rate and a buyer of left and then alternate. Just keep it going. Right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, et cetera. A variation of that third exercise is, instead of just keeping it on the snare drum to do that same exercise of four on the snare for in the first term, for the second term, and then four on the floor, tom, and then do the same thing all the way back up. The tricky part is doing those left foot variations while you're moving up and down the kit. That's gonna get your coordination up and it's going to get you used to having that left foot Gui. I'm moving up and down the kit because it can be quite hard to balance that at first. So just take it slow. There you go. That's your three exercises that you can get stuck into. That when you're playing these exercises, really pay attention to that left foot and make sure it's coming down at the exact same time as your hands. They're all coming down together and it's all in sync. You don't really want to have a delay between the hand and the left foot coming down on the beat. Because then it starts to sound quite sloppy. That will all come with time though. So those exercises will get you used to playing with that left foot. But now let's look at some grooves where we can actually implement that left foot into. We're gonna be putting these groups with the right hand on the ride cymbal instead of the hi-hat. And as you can see that the cross is actually on the top line instead of the space above it. And that indicates that we're playing a ride cymbal. What I've got for you is three different groups. And in each of these three groups, we just have those three different hi-hat variations. So the quarter note and then the eighth note, and then the offbeats doing these grooves with the left foot going can be quite daunting at first. The way I recommend you actually build up this groove is start with the feet and just get the feet tight and working together. And then add the right-hand doing eighth nodes on the ride cymbal. And finally, once you're happy with that, just to add in the left hand snare during the battery on the two and the four. And you'll end up with a cool ride cymbal groove. It does sound quite cool, but the tambourine as well. So once again, I'm just going to go through every single group and every single version of the left foot. It's fairly simple once you build up that group and take it very slow, just make sure again that your left foot is lined up with everything else you're playing. Finally, what you should try doing is keep one version of the hi-hat going. So let's say the quarter note pulse, just keep that going and left unchanged the groove. I should try that with a quarter note pulse, the eighth note pulse, and then the offbeat pulse on the left foot. Once you can flow in-between them, you can play all these groups. You've absolutely nailed that left foot. Remember in the first chapter where we did the bass drum variations with the grid, we can now use them as your groove, bass with the bass drum pattern. And you can put your right hand up to the ride cymbal and then try all three variations on the hi-hat. So have some fun with that and take it very slow. If you really are struggling, just strip it all back. Start with the feet, then add the hands. Once you're happy with the coordination of using that left foot. We're next going to look at open hi-hat grids. 28. Top tip Different sounds from a single drum: So we've done a ton of stuff on grooves, fills, sheet music, different naught values and stuff. And I thought I'd bring that up with this lesson here. In this lesson I'm going to show you how you can get multiple sounds from a single drum. Specifically, we're gonna be looking at the snare drum. So let's get behind the kit and I'll show you a few examples. I'm going to focus on the snare drum and I'm going to show you a few things that you can do to get the most out of this one drop. I've chosen this snare drum because it's the center of the drum kit, is one of the most versatile drums that you can play. And you know, you're gonna be putting out a lot. So it's cool to know what kind of different textures and sounds you can get out of this one drum. So we start off with just the normal snare drum head that's just striking the head in the middle of the drum with the tip of the stick and your Bentsen that off. So it doesn't totally chocolate the drop. So every groove and it just sounds pretty normal. So that's your basic way of playing the snare drum. That's probably what you've been playing so far. And it's great for just Griffin along. And you don't want to create too much volume from the snare drum. The second thing I'm going to show you is where you want to create a nice load cutting snare that's going to cut through a rock band or a metal band. We can use what's called the rim shot. Reverse shot is similar to the striking the drum normally, but we're adding a lot more of the shoulder of the stick to the strike. So instead of just striking the drum with the tip, we also use the shoulder of the stick because of this angle and we want to hit more of the surface area here, we actually end up hitting the rim over here. And that's a very common way to play the snare drum. Now when you start playing rim shots, you'll probably end up hitting the rim light this all you need to do is just angry. You stick slowly down so it actually contacts both the rim and the snare drum head. This is the way I normally play my snare drum. And as you can probably see, I don't know if you can see this in the camera, but my drumstick is actually freed in the middle because I'm striking the rim so much. So like I said, it creates a much louder cutting snare drum sound. So as you can hear, it's a lot louder. It's a lot more cutting and it's a very satisfying thing to play. It creates a nice crack on the snare drum and just as great for playing because it gives you that nice whacking sound. But it also feels a lot more solid when you're playing it. The third thing you can do on the snare drum is the cross thick. It's kind of like the opposite of the rim shot because it's probably the quiet is that you could do on the drum. All we need to do is put our drumstick on the snare drum and using our little pinch your fingers, so thumb and index finger would put that I ran the stick and we just leave our other fingers loose like that. So what we do is we just lift our stick up and strike the rim. You want to aim for around two o'clock on the rim. So one o'clock, two o'clock around that area because that's where it's comfortable. You want to have a nice straight wrist. So it's not like this or like that. You're not struggling to get a nice comfortable grip, but just aim for that two o'clock area. And you might want to experiment with how far the drumstick comes out. The best way to do that is just go along. For me. It's about there. You get a nice, solid, witty click. The side sticks great for if you're playing a more quiet setting, you know, acoustic act or jazz or something, you still want to have that back, but you don't want to play a loud snare drum. Another thing you could do is you can turn the stick over and play with the outside. And that creates a nice loader, more defined click. Just like that. Another thing you could do with acrostic as you can keep your hand there. But there's cross stick like that. But you can strike the surface of the drum with your other hand and that creates a nice dead sending drum. The final thing I want to show you is that you don't have to play the center of the drunk all the time. Obviously, we're just starting the center of the drama is where you get the nice focus sound. But if you go further out towards the ribbon straight this area, you get a lot more overtones and a lot more readiness. So if you want to add an explosive kind of accents sound, you can always just strike the edge of the drum, strike the room as well. And that's obviously it's like a mini rim shot. Compare that to. You'll often hear Reggae and Latin drummers play that on the edge there because it sends a good Tim Bali, which is often used in those styles of music. There you go. That's a few things you can do with the snare drum. We can also do is try all these ideas with this nears turned off. Then you've immediately got some more science that you can mess around with. Hopefully that gives you an idea of how versatile this drum is. There's a lot more ideas out there. You just have to go and explore and experiment for yourself. Acrostic is the only one out of these four that has its own notation. So where the snare drum usually goes, we've got a cross, and that signifies that we're meant to be playing across thick and not a normal snare drum hit. The other variations such as the edge here on the snare drum, will probably be written as text on the sheet music so that you know what's going on. But hopefully they get your creative juices flowing and have some fun with it. 29. Top tip hh flourishes: Alright guys, how's it going? In this lesson, I will show you a cool little trick that you can do that's going to allow your groups to flow a lot better. This trick really applies for when you're doing 16th note flourishes on the hi-hat. So maybe you're doing a straight eighth note groove like 1234, and then maybe add some 16th note flourishes on the hi-hat. So it could be something like 12348. And I wanted to show you today is that you don't have to play your hand all the way up on the other side of the hi-hat to get this flourishes because there is a lot of movement from your left hand and the snare drum to this side of the hi-hat. That's where you'd normally play 16th notes in the hi-hat. So as you can see, there's a lot of movement from that left hand going up and down. What I'm going to show you today is a way to minimize that movement from the left hand to the snare up to the high hat. What I like to do with them playing those hi-hat notes on the left hand is instead of moving up completely like this, but actually just keeping your wrist here where it normally is, instead of moving my entire hand to strike the hi-hat Like this, why do is instead just rotate the wrist and strike the hi-hat with the side of the stick. So becomes more of a like a whip motion. Your arm is staying where it is and then you're just moving and rotating your wrist to bring your stick up to the high art like this. I'll demonstrate that for you very slowly. It really starts to come into its own. When you speed things up. Once again, you're just rotating your wrist up to strike the hi-hat with the shoulder of the stick and you're coming back down almost like a side swipe. To begin with, that movement is slightly unnatural, but use your fingers to control the stick and add power that way. It's not totally sideways like that. You just want to add a kind of rotational movement to it. That little trick is going to help your groups flu a lot better though. So bear that in mind if you're ever doing that kind of groove and you want to embellish, definitely try that out. 30. Open Hi Hat Grooves: In the last lesson, we looked at how we can use our left foot and implement it into our ride cymbal groove. What we're going to talk about now is how we can use open hi-hats to come up with cool and interesting sounding groups. When you're given along with the higher and you open it up in certain parts. It just adds a bit of texture and it can add a lot to the group without doing too much. It's a nice little embellishment you can do that can complement other parts of the music that you're playing two. So instead of just playing constant hi-hats going all the time, we can open it up and add a bit of air to that groove. The first thing I'm going to show you is a little exercise that you can do. Let's get any help your left foot get used to playing alongside the grooves that you're gonna be doing. What we're gonna do is just play constant eighth notes on the hi-hat. And on the last, it's not off the bar. We're going to lift our fruit slightly off to create a nice open hi-hat. You don't want to take your foot completely off the football. Do you want to always be in control of the hi-hat pedal? So just lift off slightly and create a nice sizzle. When I want to use an open hi-hat, I usually just open it slightly with the left foot. So it's not too harsh all of a sudden. But if you're playing rock grooves are no heavier stuff, then absolutely lifted a wee bit more. But like I said, don't lift the left foot completely off the foot plate because it'll just be a bit too harsh when you're playing. And also you want to have the control. You want to always be in control of the foot plate. So you lift that foot for the final H naught and then you bring it right back down on the next day. It's not on the hi-hat. The weight and open hi-hat is notated is just a simple little circle about the hi-hat. You can assume that if the next hi-hat note doesn't have a circle above it, it means that it's closed again. Once you got the hang of that, you can now add the bass drum on the quarter note while doing that same hand pattern. This may be challenging at first because you're probably not used to using your left foot like that. But if you stick with it and make sure that both feet are coming down at the same time and it's all lining up as usual. Then hopefully it will sound like what I've just played. Take it very slow if you need to and just really focus on making that left foot, right foot and right hand all line up. The next variation of the exercise is the same thing, but instead of playing the bass drum on every quarter note, we're playing the snare drum. Again, just take this slow and make sure that your left hand and right hand and left foot are all lining up on. The final variation is playing both the bass drum and the snare drum on every quarter note. And that means all four limbs are working together. So it's gonna be a bit of a balancing act. But just get used to that and have good posture. And just makes sure that everything is lining up. As always. Once you've got the hang of that, we can now look at some grooves. So as always, I've got a bunch of examples for you. You can download them all in the worksheet as usual as well. And so I'm just going to run through them all for you. If you're struggling with any of these groups, just start with the hi-hat on the hand. Then add the OpenNotes with your left foot, and then add the bass drum. And then finally add the snare drum. If you struggle with anything in the drums, the best thing to do is just break down each limb and figure out what's going on in each limb separately and then put it all back together. You're adding an extra limit into your pleadings. So it's going to take a little while to get used to and that's okay. It took me a long time to get used to open hi-hat groups. This will be a challenge and just make sure that your left and right foot are playing at the same time when they need to, and that your hands are lining up their feet as well. The way to sound good when you're grieving is making sure that that happens. I just want to reiterate the notation quickly. If it's got a circle over the high hat, that means that it's an open hi-hat. And if the next hi-hat naught has no circle over, that means you're closing it and that's when the left foot comes down. Once again, what you can do is you can go back to the groups that you learned in the grid system. And you can just add some open hi-hats wherever you feel like it. You can even use that grid system that we used in chapter one and just put random circles wherever you want. And you can try it and see how these grooves sound. So have fun and experiment, and I'll see you later. 31. Syncopated Bass Drum Grooves: Alright, today's lesson is going to be a brutal one, is also going to be a really fun one. I'm going to show you how you can use syncopated 16th notes in the bass drum to come up with a really interesting groups. So what does it mean when something syncopated? Syncopation in music is where you play rhythms that don't necessarily line up with the normal group. So if you listen to a drumbeat, there's a lot of different things that wouldn't normally occur in a normal eighth note groove. But they're playing different snare drum beats and their accent in different parts. And it all comes together and it creates a much more interesting piece of music. When anyone talks about syncopation is just that blanket term of just interesting rhythms that go against the beat. And the basis of this lesson is that we're going to be playing eighth note groups with the hands. I'm going to be messing around with that syncopation with 16th notes on the bass drum. Now this is gonna be a hard lesson because you're not used to doing this and it's going to take awhile. So don't get mad at yourself. If you can't do it after five tries or 50 tries or a 100 tries. This will take time. This took me a very long time to get, so just take it slow. The whale structure of this lesson is I'll show you the first example, and I'll show you how I work it out and play it and figure it all out in terms of limbs. And then it's the exact same process for the other examples. And then I'll just play through the other examples instead of explaining one-by-one because that'll be an hour long lesson. Now, for all these initial examples is just gonna be the bass drum and the high hat. And then the second variation of these examples is just add in that snare drum on the two and the four. But for now we're just looking at the hi-hat and bass drum. So let's look at this first example. I'm just break it down rhythmically. First saw the rhythm itself is just 1234. And that's our basic rhythm. We're just playing out in different parts of the drum kit. The way I tackle all these examples is I would actually just go through note by note and figure out what's being played in each note. So the first that we're playing a bass drum on the hi-hat together. The second note is just a bass drum by itself. Then finally we've got a hi-hat by itself. And if you just take it really slow and play it like this, if you just go together, bass drum, hi-hat together, bass drum, hi-hat, and just take it that slow. You'll eventually get up the coordination that's required and then you can start to speed it up. As always, with these examples, I recommend you count semiquavers the whole time and that'll make it easier for your counting. But if you see an example and you think, Oh my gosh, how do I even play that? Just break it down by looking at the rhythm first and then looking at the orchestration, I E, what you're actually playing and when you're playing it together and when you're playing things separately. As I mentioned before, all these examples have two versions. We've got the version which is just the bass drum on the hi-hat. And then we've got the one that's the bass drum, the high hats, and then the snare on the two and the four. So once you have built up that coordination with just the bass drum and the high hat. The next stage is to add that back between the two and the four. And you've got yourself a syncope and groove. Let's go through all the examples now. On, I'll play the version that's just got the hi-hat and bass drum. And then I'll play the version that's got the snare drum as well. All of these examples are just meant to build the coordination. And then you can take these ideas and put them all together in different ways, mix and match. And you can come up with some really crazy groups. But for now we'll just go through these exercises, tickets super slow, and just get that coordination up. Like I said, this is gonna be really hard to begin with. Count out loud and don't get mad at yourself. Good. That is a lot of examples. So I'm not expecting you to do all these one by one in one go because that's going to be a bit of a brain melt. Just take a couple of a time getting used to them. Take it to the drum kit and just play and practice them, come back and do a couple more and just work that way. That way you actually have time to digest that and you can build up the muscle memory a lot better. Next, I'm going to show you a few examples of what you can do if you combine these different patterns and you can come up with some cool grooves. Each of these grooves is from a song, so I'll put a little annotation of what that song is. Now this is the part where drum start to get really interesting when you start to add these 16th notes in the bass drum and eventually the snare drum, which is actually the next lesson. It starts to become this much more expressive thing because you're able to play eighth note groups, but then move out of that x-naught grid into 16th notes with different limbs. And that is where all the funk music, all the interest in grooves, all the fun stuff is all the napkin area. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with playing just our street down the line rock groove. If that's what the song needs. It's all about having those skills in our arsenal ready to go. So if you do need it, you can use it. We're going to be doing the exact same thing now with the snare drum. 32. Syncopated Snare Drum Grooves: Hopefully you've built up some bass drum syncopation knowledge on. You've got some independence and your right foot. Notes tend to look at the left hand and how we use the snare drum in the same way. The processes are the exact same as learning. This is all the same stuff. So I'm not gonna yap on about how to do this. I'm just going to get through all the exercises, so it's not a super long video. Again, just a little reminder though, what we can do is we can look at the rhythms first. In this first example is 1234. And then we'll just break up what's playing together and what's being separate. In this case, it's together than left-hand than right hand. Or you just play that really slowly and eventually come to you. Just like the last lesson though, we've got two versions of every exercise. So firstly, we're just doing the hi-hat on the left hand and the snare. And then the second variation is we add a Ford and for bass drum. So it's playing every quarter note because you're adding that right foot and it's a freeway coordination. So it will be a bit more challenging. But then it's a really good exercise to do. I'm going to stop talking and just let you hear all these examples played out. Never know this lesson and the last lesson, there's just so many exercises and you're probably thinking is so dull. And it can be at times, you know, it's a bit of a grinder at this point. But I promise you it's worth it because what we're doing is we're building our vocabulary. And that means that we can now take these vocabulary. You use little patterns and build them up and use them in context to see something on the drum kit. And that's really excited. I could just teach you 50 drum beats from 50 songs. But that means you only know how to play those 50 songs really well. And this is all about teaching you the tools to come up with your own stuff. As I always say, that's much more rewarding. I promise you if you're actually going through this and just do all the work, it will be worth it. Because then you'll start to recognize patterns and you'll know how to play them. So you can listen to a song and listen to a drumbeat and think, oh, that's what he's doing. He's doing a one knee and two E and a free on Fourier end kind of thing on the hi-hat between the snare and the tall. So I can copy that and that way it's much more rewarding just to get you started. Dog got three groups from three different songs plus one group that's just made up by me. So hopefully you can groove along two songs immediately once you've learned all these different bits and bobs from the other vocabulary and all these exercises. Good. That example is actually part of what we call the Amen break. The amine break is actually a really famous drum part that you'll recognize in drum and bass music, hip hop music, louder dance music. And it's just a simple drum sample from a song called Amen brother by the Winston's. If you just Google the amine, there'll be loads of lists of songs that have used this beat. So if you learn that groove, you're gonna be able to play loads of music. Also, I'm gonna do a little plug here if you are interested in learning more about how to play electronic music and drum and bass music, and learning more about the amine break, I've got a second course called the hybrid drummer that goes into all of that in so much detail. Anyway, that's the plug over. Yes, I'm sorry, it's really Dalit a moment. It's a bit of a grain these last two lessons. But we're gonna be back on track. We're gonna be learning some fun stuff in a bit. But for now, practice those two lessons and then start to combine the bass drum stuff for the snare drum stuff. And you'll be like, Thank God, you know, if you listened to some old James Brown stuff or the mall tone stuff, there'll be plenty of really funky drums. I've got that syncopation. So once you've got that vocabulary in your head, go listen to some of that, recreate it. 33. Permutations Exercise Build Limb independence: In today's lesson, I want to talk about 16th note permutations. Now that is a very fancy word. If you don't know what permutation means, the dictionary definition is each of several possible ways in which a set or a number of things can be ordered or arranged on what does that actually mean in terms of drop-ins? But when I talk about 16th note permutations, I'm talking about all the different possible ways that you can play 16th notes in a beat or in a bar. Playing through these permutations is a great way to build up limb independence. So you can do more complicated based on stuff or snare drum stuff when you're grieving. It's a great way to build up accuracy within the 16th note groove. Timing, all that good stuff. And if you're confused, don't worry, I'm going to break all down for you. It's quite similar to the last two lessons, but we're just going to dig a bit deeper into the whole concept. Let's go back to our good pal, the grid system that we did in the previous chapter. What we've got here is just a normal H naught rock groove, pretty standard. You got your hi-hats on every eighth note. The bass drum is on the 1234, and then your snare drums on the two and the four. The difference now is that we've got our grid setup in 16th notes and not just eighth notes. So there's more squares. We've got 16 squares instead of x squared is in the bar. So what we're gonna do in these permutation exercises is we're just going to keep with the hi-hat and the snare drum the exact same as our basic beat, That's our skeleton beat. And what we're gonna do is we're going to actually just shift our bass drum note to our bass drum little circle. We're going to shift up to the right by one square. And we're going to do that to every single base note on the grid. So every single bass drum is shifted by one semiquaver. So the first variation is just playing on the 1234 on the bass drum. And then we shift it to the right. So we're doing that on the one, eat and eat, and eat and eat. And so we've shifted it by one semiquaver. This is our first permutation because it's just a variety and a sequence of 16th notes. We just do this another two times. What we then do is shift the bass drum notes again by one square to the right. So that then plays on the ends of every beat. And the final permutation is playing on every beat. So one Adafruit. And if we shifted this one more time to the right, we'd actually end up in the first version where we're playing on the 1234 and the bass drums. That's because we've shifted so far that we've actually reset the grid. So the one furthest to the right actually just comes back to the start of the beat. We're on the 1234. So there's actually only four variations need to worry about. That's the basic concept of permutations in 16th notes. You're just taking one of the notes and just moving it to the right on a grid. While do is just play through that exercise. And the way I actually play this is just play one bar of the first permutation, one bar, the second, one bar the third, well then one bar the fourth one. And then you can just loop that round as much as you want. I'll play it for you. A slow and fast tempo. That is a great exercise in itself. Of course, what we can do now is we can actually do to base your notes in a row instead of just the one. It's the exact same concept. We've got our two bass drums and every beat, and all we do is shift these two bass drums and shifting to the right on the grid. And this is where it starts to get a bit more challenging because you have to worry about doing two base from notes. And especially when you start to loop it, you'll end up playing theory-based of notes and a rule. But of course, if you're struggling, just focus on the right hand and then the right foot, and then bring the snare drum in later. And of course, just take it slow. I'll play this permutation variation of the two bass drums in a row so you can hear how it sounds. And of course we can do the exact same thing with the snare drum. So our skeleton B is gonna be just eighth notes on the hi-hat, and then bass drums on 1234. And then we do the exact same thing and we just do the snare drum on the 1234 as well. And then we shifted on the grid of 16th notes to the right. And then we do it in the one, eat and eat, and eat, and eat. And we just keep shifting it. Once again, there's only four varieties. So here's how that sounds. You can do that again with the two snare drums in a row as well. Honestly, playing for these permutations is such a powerful thing you can do because you're gonna get so comfortable within the 16th note subdivision, which for the most part is what you're going to be playing in. So it's a really powerful thing. If you can get comfortable, then you're laughing. And once you are happy and you can do that pretty easily, what you can do is change up your skeleton groups. So the kind of thing that you're just keeping the same, you can change that. So my example I've got here is that we're changing our right hand to play 1234. And we've got our snare drum on the two and the four. And then we just do our bass drum permutations over that. And that again is a monster, monster exercise. Now that is a challenge by the way. So don't try it and get upset if you can't do it because as I say, that's more advanced stuff. But if you are feeling confident and you feel like you can do it, then absolutely go for it. And of course, you can think of your own skeleton groups to put over your permutations. Playing through this and getting comfortable with this is such a powerful thing though honestly, you'll be able to listen to grooves and just hear what they're doing and just be able to play it instantly. These permutation exercises just build up that coordination that allows you to think of a groove and just play it immediately. In my opinion, it really is the secret to just having that ability to just play what you want to play, especially when you're playing grooves is so handy. So for example, I'm just going to play some stuff that involves all these different permutations. And I'll just do a little improvisation of a drum solo slash group thing. So you can hear how you can actually apply all this stuff. This stuff is properly brain melting, so I recommend you just stop the course now. Just go off and practice this and then come back later. If you are binge-watching, know Fairplay, just come back to this because it's really important. 34. Adding Bass Drums to Fills: So you're playing your drawings, you're grieving along. You've got a really cool driving drumbeat, maybe like four on the floor and the bass drum. And you're just driving the band or the song that you're playing two, and it just sends awesome. Then when it comes to the drum fill, you just do your standard drum fill. But EBITDA beauty, beauty, P2P repeatability, which sounds great, but you notice that it might actually lose some of that power that you had in the groove. And that's because you're playing a group that's got four on the floor, on the bass drum. And then you suddenly play a field that has got no basis at all. So you lose a lot of that low end, that low frequency, and a lot of that power from the drum kit. So one trick I do all the time is I actually keep that bass drum going in the drum fills, adding base jumps, drum fills is a great way to add power to your fills. It also means that you've got a much more cohesive bond between both the drum fill and the drum groove. So instead of just feeling like a drum fill, then I grew than drum fill in a groove. It actually sounds like more like one meshed thing because you've got a bass drum going the entire time. And it's not so jarring when you hear a drum fill and then suddenly there's no bass drum. So I'm going to show you a few different examples of what you can do and how you can add a base from two different drum fills. The first thing you could do with the bass drum and the drum fill is what I'm talking about in the first scenario at the start of the video, where you've got a foreigner for driving growth. And then you just keep that bass drum going on the floor and the floor. When you're doing your drum fill, no matter what it is, keeping the bass drum going on the quarter note during the fill and the group is just a great way to keep your timing and check. And it also keeps up the momentum and the feel of the groove. If you wanted to take that driving feeling even further, you can plead angstroms on every eighth note and that creates an even more driving, explosive drum fill. You'll hear a lot of rock drummers do that. They read the play eighth notes in the bass drum and then they play a big snare drum roll into a new section of the song, which is almost like the climax of the song. Another thing you can do is separate out bass drum notes in the fill. Since they're doing eighth notes all on your hands, you can add some bass drums instead of hands. So in this first example, we're actually separating out the eighth notes, alternate strokes on the hand, then the fruit. You can also do not just with eighth notes, but also with sixteenths, those. So try that concept is fairly simple. You just add some bass drum notes into your drum fills, either on the quarter notes, eighth notes, or anywhere you want really. And you'll find that your drum fills just have a lot more power to them. Now, playing the bass drum on the fields is something I do all the time because I love the feeling of the power behind that bass drum, especially when you combine it with the toms and especially the floor tom. If you're playing rock stuff and you've got the bass drum and the fourth time playing at the same time, it can shatter walls. You know, I really recommend you give that a bash because it's so much fun. And hopefully that gives you a few ideas of how you can use that right foot along with your drum fills. 35. Accents - Accent Study: The next few lessons in this chapter are going to be devoted to dynamics. Now what our dynamics, simply put dynamics or where you change the volume of your playing. So, for example, are very dynamic piece could be an orchestra piece. Berg was up and down in volume and very dynamic ways were compared to like a pop song where it's very much just the same level the whole way through. It's not very dynamic. Dynamics are very important for drummers and it really separates out the wheat from the chaff. I think that's a scene. Yeah. Yeah. There's a saying it's the same. We have the chaff separate out the good players from the not-so-good players. If you want to be a musical drama, you want to incorporate dynamics into your plane. So you want to be able to go up in volume and come down in volume and played dynamically. That way you're gonna be a very musical player and your band mates are going to love you for being able to actually control your dynamics and not just bashing away the entire time. I'm sure if you watch any famous drum solo, you're going to see a lot of dynamics in play. You're going to see the player come down in volume and then build up some tension and then bring up the dynamics to a crescendo. In a climax of the solo is the same thing we're just playing in the song as well. I'm going to stop rambling on about dynamics and get into the lesson. But just know that dynamics are very important. The waitlist talk about accents. So an accent is just an emphasis on an OT or a set of notes. The weights notated is with a little arrow above the note that you're going to accent. Simply put, we just hit the drum or symbol slightly harder than we would compare it to the other notes. It's all contextual though. So if you're playing a quiet song and the drums and you see an accent coming up. Don't just whack the drum when the accident comes up. Actually play it just slightly louder. So it is accented and is emphasized. But it's not just totally dissociated with the rest of the plane. And likewise, as you're playing really loud already, make sure to whack it and accent that really nicely. So to put an accent, it's pretty simple. You just played slightly loader. So with accents, we can take this 16th note snare drum roll. From this to this. We don't play anything different apart from just adding accents into that hand pattern. So let's get into some exercises that are going to build up your accent abilities. We're going to start on quarter notes and just accent the different quarter notes. Then we're going to do our eighth notes, and then finally our 16th notes. And we're going to do different accent patterns when you're playing these exercises start just by putting the first bar loop that until you're comfortable than the second bar loop that until you're comfortable and just play all these bars separately until you're happy with them separately. And then put them altogether in the line and then play them one by one. So I'll quickly go through all these exercises for you. I'll play each bar in exercise twice, and then I'll go around and do one after the other twice as well in the exercise. All of these examples are just played as a single stroke. So they've just gone right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left alternate strokes. So just go through all those exercises and just make sure that your accents on both the right-hand and left-hand or the same volume. And you're making them nice and even don't be afraid to take it slow and just make sure you've got the movement and it's nice and fluid and you're not too tense or anything when you're playing these accidents. Once you're happy with those exercises, I've got some accent patterns we need to mess around with. Now these are just written as 16th notes on the snare drum. And as you can see, there's different accent patterns that we'll go through. Now you can play these accent patterns just on the snare drum, just as is with the accents. But a fun thing you can do is you can actually move around the kit so you can play the right-hand accents on the fourth term, on the left hand accent on the high tone. So as always, I'll go through all the examples with you. I'll start off with putting the drum filled. It's just the snare drum accents. Then I'll put the same accent patterns, but I'll move around the kit. So the right hand accents will go to the fourth term. On the left-hand accents will go up to this first rack tom. Those examples should get you started, but I recommend you just mess around and see if you can come up with your own accent patterns and then try and move them around the kit. You don't have to do this specific rule of right hand on the floor, tom and left handed the first time. You can move it around and see what you can find. So maybe you do some cymbal crashes on the right hand and then move to the left hand up and down the drum kit in different ways. Accents are gonna be the thing that teacher drama into that next level. It just adds a bit of texture and dimension to your playing. And that makes it much more interesting for you, the player and the listeners out there. I hope you have fun with that. And next time we're looking at how we can apply these accents to grooves. 36. Accents in grooves: Last time we were looking at how we can use accents and fills and how we can build up some fills with accent patterns. This time we're gonna be looking at how we can use accents in groups and how we can make them more three-dimensional and more interesting. So just like the accents and the fills with the grooves for just accenting and emphasizing different parts of the groove. So the most common use of accents in groups is on the right hand, on the hi-hat or the rate somewhere or whatever. In this case, we're looking at the hi-hat primarily. And we're going to be first looking at ethnic groups and how we can add different accents to change the feel of a simple rock groove. Before we talk about anything, I want to talk about how we actually accent or notes on the hi-hat or rather the way I do it. And a lot of other drummers do it as well. So instead of just hitting harder onto the hi-hat like this, which is absolutely an option like that. What I tend to do is actually use the shoulder of the stick. This part here, the chunky bit and actually dig in to the edge of the hi-hat like so you get a much more chunky, thicker sound. See you? I mean, there's a lot more chunky than just hitting the top of the hi-hat harder. So if we compare the two, you get a lot more emphasis from the hi-hat. If you dig your shoulder into the edge of the hi-hat, and that was not for everything. If you just want a nice clean sound, then absolutely just put the top of the hi-hat. But if you want a chunkier sound and absolutely dig that, stick into the edge of the hi-hat. Now when you're playing a normal ethanol group, you'll probably end up actually doing the quarter no accent anyway. If I'm just playing it like this, I tend to just accent that quarter note by digging into stick. Anyway, just for, that's just my style of drumming. That's just something I do. I'm just playing those accents like that. It gives you a nice fluid motion with your wrist. And that brings me on to my next point when you're playing faster and more aggressive hi-hats on your plane ticket need for Not really fast. Don't just go like this. That's gonna be so exhausting after awhile because you're just playing high hats like that. The whole time. You're going to hurt your wrist and you probably going to tense up and you're not gonna be able to last a whole song playing it that way. But if you play it like the way I was playing it before with quarter no accents. And it's playing the eighth notes like that. You'll end up with the Evernote motion with the rest. So instead of going completely up and down, you actually end up going forward and back shorter than tip, shorter than tip plate that. And that's a much more fluid and easy way to play faster groups. I'll play it slow to begin with. And then as a speedup, hopefully you can see that my hand is moving in and out like a train or, you know, as Todd sacramento playing pool so you can shooting the stick into the high hats. You'll also see that the movement gets smaller and smaller. So you have a much more economic way of playing the drums. And that means you'll be able to last for a whole set or an entire song and you won't be tired out this way. So here we go. So I kinda changed to a 16th note halftime groove there. But as you can see, the speed of that hand is still the same. And using a lot more risk and a lot more in and out motion rather than up and down. If I tried to play that same speed with the wrist, it's very hard and you're going to end up with a wrist injury. So my advice for you, if you're playing fast groups or you want to have a nice flowing risk movement when you're playing your drums and when I feel more relaxed, if you just kinda do the in and out motion and that's going to help you build up that control. And it's going to help you play a lot longer and a lot more faster in the long run. So try it out. So let's look at a few ways that we can accent my right hand on the hi-hat and an ethyl group. So just like the example I just showed you there, we were doing that shaft step shafts stick in the night motion with the stick. And we're doing that on the high hat so we accent every quarter note. The next thing we can do is excellent the offbeat. So instead of doing the 1234 and accents, we're doing the opposite. We're going 1234. And it's very similar to the wrist movement or the quadrennial accents. We're just doing the opposite. That of her accent is a great way to spice up grooves that could just be plain and boring after awhile, I'm just doing those off-beat accents make it sound much more interesting. I'll show you a couple more examples of just changing the accents on the right hand on the hi-hat. So you can see how much a group can change just by adding different types of accents. The next thing I'm going to show you is coming back to the snare drum accent patterns from the previous lesson. I'm going to use a couple of those snare drum accent patterns, and I'm going to put them onto the hi-hat. The first variation I'm going to show you a few, is where we take that accent pattern put out in the high hat. And then we add our snare on the two and the four, and the bass drum on the one in the free. So it's that same 16th note pattern, but we've played a million times by now. But it's got that accent pattern which makes it a much more interesting and evolving. So it's not just the same thing over and over again. It's actually got a bit of up and down dynamics. The next variation I've got for you is, if you remember from the last lesson, we were playing the snare drum and then we put the right hand accents on the fourth term, the left hand back since up and the first time, doing a similar kind of thing. But the basis is not the snare drum is up in the high hat. On both the right and left-hand accents are going down to the snare drum. If you add a four and the four bass drum to that pattern as well, it just sounds mega. Another thing we didn't really talk about in the last lesson is how we can actually use the for Tom and play our accent patron's on that. And it just sounds like a really cool driving force. So if you're playing a big heavy rock June maybe just go into for Tom and just do some driving stuff. They're changing the accents. The final variation I've got for you is taken the right hand on the floor tom, and then a left hand up to another term or the snare drum or wherever, just another voice on the drum kit. If you play those accent patterns between those two different voices, sounds like a really cool groove, especially if you get that 44 base pair, Meghan. So there you go. That is it. It's not actually too complicated. And really you can see the power of accents and how you can use them in different ways. They really do open up a huge door of possibilities and creativity and just making your groove sound a lot more interesting. I think that's the thing because you can play a rock groove the same way and it sounds good, Sounds fine, or you can jam along the songs. But if you start to put different accents on, it just sounds like such a musical thing rather than just a bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. You can add a lot more dynamics and just interesting things for the listener. Undo. So go out there, explore for yourself and take care. See you later. 37. Ghost notes: Whoa, whoa, world these ghosts doing here, is this place haunted? Or is it because we're talking about ghost notes? That is the worst intro I've ever done to video. I'm sorry. But yes, we're talking about ghost notes today. I'm really excited about the subject because I love goes not so much. And I'm really happy we're finally at the point where we can talk about them. Now. What are gallstones? Gallstones are basically the opposite of accents. Accents make things louder, whereas ghost notes make things quieter. Course notes are notated with a little bracket around the notes that are posted. So if you see that in the notation, you know that you're gonna be playing them quieter than the rest of the notes. Course notes are an essential tool for every drummer. They're just great to play it and then just add a lot more air **** and texture to your grooves. Also add some dynamics. So it's not all the same thing. They really are so useful and you'll see all the professional drummers. They're playing ghost notes that pretty much the entire time they're grieving. The way we're going to structure this lesson is we're gonna start off with some examples and exercises that we can use to build up the control to play our ghost notes. And then we're going to implement them into groups. But before I get into that, I want to talk about this cool trick that I use for my students when they first start playing ghost notes. When you're playing goals for what you want to have your stick quite close to the surface of the drum head. So quite close, you don't wanna be up here or anything. I just want to be able to tap it and just play that. And the way I get my students to actually build that discipline and control is to get assemble start. I've put the boom arm above the snare drum, and then you have to play the stick underneath that boom arm. The nice thing is about the symbol Stan is its height adjustable so you can move your symbol stand up quite far above the stereotype to start off with. And you can slowly bring it down and give yourself less and less room to play these gospels. Ideally, you want to be playing it quite a lot. Hates. You've got a little room and it's going to build that control and discipline. With that being said, let's crack on with a few exercises. We'll start off with three different exercises that will build up that control for the course notes. And then I'll show you some techniques to do with the hand and wrist movements to get the most rigorous thoughts. When you're playing grooves, to have a lot of ghost notes on them. For example, a old-school fun can stuff. You'll find that you have to play notes on a sequence of notes and the snare drum that garlic, of course naught and then an accent. So you didn't quiet loud, quiet, loud. And then you've also got the opposite where you go load than quiet. Usually in 16th notes. These can be quite tricky and hard to temple. So I just wanna show you some of the movements that you do with the stick that make it a lot easier. So let's start off with a sequence where it's going loud, so an axon and then it goes, nope, straight after. Like I said, they're usually played a 16th notes. The way I approach this is fairly simple. We'll go down for the first note, which is the accent. So I usually play them as a rim shot. And then for the second ghost note, I just simply lift the stick and then slightly tap it on the way back up. So if I do my accent and then my ghost note. So as you can see, it's one fluid movement. So we go up to the accident and they will lift backoff for the ghost note. It's almost like you're pushing the accident down and then you're pulling the stick away. And when you pull it away, you get an extra note. Dow come in really handy when you're doing drum and bass staff, Fung's stuff, rock stuff, loads of stuff. I use that movement all the time. There's just a nice fluid way to get basically two nodes, i, if the one stroke, the next version is verbing to the ghost note first and then we'll do the accident afterwards. I find this a bit more tricky, I will be honest, but the way I like to do is to your cap structures for the ghost note and slightly angled to stick down to get that rim shot. It kinda becomes a sort of width motion. So you get your tap stroke. And then you've got your exit stroke by just digging in the stick into the rim. There you go. That is the hand movements that I do. The more you practice, the more you play the music, the more you'll get used to and you'll get a more natural feeling and sound out of the sticks. Here's a couple of simple exercises you can do to build up those risks, movements. Finally, we can start to look at some groups and how we can use these ghost notes in context. Now when it comes to ghost notes, the thing is, I think a lot of the drama is don't really think about it when you're playing them. So you can notate all these cool font tunes out and there's gonna be loads of gallstones everywhere. But a general rule is that you want to have the snare drum accents on the two and the four as the backbeat. And then you can just kinda fill in the gaps with ghost notes. There's honestly loads of different combinations and there's loads of different groups out there. The best thing is to go through all these groups have gotten to teach for you. And then just go off and start listening to old funk tunes, Motown tunes, Red Hot Chili Peppers is a great one. Basically, any music, because most drumming has gotten off center. You just got to look out for the bacteria and the two in the four. And then there'll be lots of little soft snare drum hits in-between that usually in most songs, listening to music and just learning what all these drummers did with these goals and what's, it's just a great way to learn. Highly recommend, just gone off and listening to a bunch of stuff and just digesting it and come into the drum kit and just practicing for yourself. Have some fun. And I really do recommend putting something above the snare so you can build up that control and really just work on the wrist movements. In terms of the notes played. We're not doing anything crazy different. We're just doing different dynamics. And that's the hard part. Actually learning to control your stick is the hard part. Where's the notes? You probably have played all these notes before, focused on Dynamics and Control. And you'll be golden. 38. Dynamic Markings: Alright guys, how's it going? I just want to make a quick video on dynamic markings. Dynamic markings is what we use in sheet music to tell the player how loud to play. Basically, they're very handy because you just look at a certain symbol or certain letter and you know exactly how longitude play. But I will mention before I go into anything that all these dynamic markings, their official names are in Italian I think. But don't worry too much about that. Just memorize the symbols and letters. And that's actually going to be a lot more handy. If you do want to learn the names though, then go for it. There's no harm in doing that. Let's first look at the letter markings. There's three main letters you want to learn. There's P, which stands for piano, there's F, which stands for 40. And then there's M that stands for meso. Let's start with the quiet dynamics. P for piano is quiet. And the more peace we add to this, the more quiet room or into play if we're reading sheet music and we saw one P at the start of music. We know we'd play it quietly. But if we saw two p's or even three P's, that's even quieter. So the more peace we see, the more quiet replay. I believe the names are piano for 1-p. pianissimo for TPS. And then I think it's like piano ECMO for three-piece. I'm not, I'm not good at Italian. So in terms of dynamics, if we start the quietest, it's three P's, then to peace, and then one P. And then bingo to NP, which is mezzo piano, which means medium soft. We never really use m by itself. It's usually before some other dynamics. So either MP or MAF, which I'll get into in a second. So that just means we played medium quiet. If we step up or dynamics once more, we get to M F. Now F stands for forte, which means load. So MF means medium load. That means we play at a medium load volumes. So it's not too overpowering, but it's got some, got some beef to the VSEPR up once again, we get to F, which is 40. 14th means loud. And just like the piano of p for quiet, the more F's we add, the lighter meant to play. So we've got the 1.5, which means 40. And then we've got the two Fs, which mean fortissimo. Fortissimo is very loud. And then finally, we've got three S, which is for PTC symbol, which is as loud as you can play, basically super, super load. So it's actually pretty simple. You just got, remember P, which means quiet. And the more you add, the more quiet your arm. And you've got F, which means forte, which is load. And the more F's you have, the more larger meant to play. And the M is something you use before the other letters. So mp equals medium quiet, I, M, F equals medium loud. It's a nice bridge between the P and the F, and that's it for the letters. Now we can look at crescendos and diminuendo. Imagine you had four bars that had the P, dynamic market at the start of the music. And that means that you play those four bars quietly. And then the next four bars they have the F dynamic, which means you play them load. That means you play the first four bars really quietly, and then suddenly you play in load. There's no gradual increase in that. But with crescendos and innuendos, that's where we have a slow increase or decrease in dynamics. Let's look at crescendos first. Crescendo means we increase in dynamics and it's represented by expanding triangle. We see that symbol at the bottom of the bars. And the length of that triangle represents how long we're actually increasing the dynamics for. If the crescendos over two bars, we're increasing our dynamics over two bars. But if it's increasing over eight bars, were doing a slower, gradual increase in dynamics. And usually at the start and finish off our crescendo, we have two different dynamic markings. So let's see. There's, at the start there's a P, and then at the end there's an F. So that means we know we're going from quiet to loud and we're increasing over this certain amount of time. It's fairly self-explanatory. When you see that symbol, you're like, Okay, I'm gonna get loader diminuendo. Those are the exact same thing but in the opposite direction. So we're getting quieter. Again, is just represented by a symbol that's closing. So it's a triangle that closes this time instead of opens up again, the length of this symbol represents how long were actually taken to go from loud to quiet. Once again, we'll usually have dynamic markings, such as an FF for fortissimo, down to like a P, which means quiet. And the combination of the crescendo and diminuendo symbols and letters. We have a great knowledge and a great understanding of what the composer wants us to play. And that's the purpose of dynamic markets. In the lesson resources, I've got a worksheet that tells you all the information that's in this video. Just a nice compact sheets so you can use that for reference. So get learning that. And I do apologize for my Italian pronunciation. I'm terrible at it. 39. Different time signatures: Well, we've avoided that so far, but I think it's time to talk about different time signatures. By now. I'm sure we're very familiar with the 44 time signature, but as I mentioned way back in the second chapter, there's more than one time signature. In this lesson, I want to talk about the main time signatures you're going to come across, had to read them, how to play them. And I also want to talk about the differences between simple time and compound time. Let's have a quick look at 44 again. The bottom number of the time signature indicates a certain kind of note value, and the top note reveals how many of those notes are in each bar. A bar of 44 contains four quarter notes. Let's look at free for now. We can apply the exact same rule and we can figure out that there's gonna be three quarter notes in every bar. The free-fall time signature is often used in like wants music. So like 123123123, that kind of thing. So I'm going to show you a couple of groups that can use in that context. Another example is 54. That's where we have five quarter notes and A-bar is often used in progressive metal and more technical stuff because it is an odd number and it can be quite hard to get your head round a wee bit. The way I think about 54 is just a bar of 44, then you just add one extra beat on top of that. Here's a group that is in 54. Now this is where if things are going to get a little confusing, so buckle in strapping. And here we go. Let's look at this time signature here, 68. We can look at the top number and no, there are six notes in the bar. But as you can see, the bottom number is an eight, not four. What does that mean exactly? Well, simply put, it means that in a bar of six, there are 6 eighth notes in the bar. And instead of using the quadrant or as our pulse, we now use the eighth notes as our past because we've got the eight on the bottom of the time signature. The way these eighth notes are actually freezed in the sheet music is the more interesting part. What we've seen so far in bars of 44 is the phrases of eighth notes been grouped as four notes or two nodes. But in a bar of 16th, the group has three nodes. The way we actually count 68 is very simple because our eighth note is now our pulse. We're just counting up 123456123456, often in 68, the accents land on the first note and the fourth note, which again emphasizes the freezers are free in the eighth notes. Here's a couple of 68 drum beats. These are great for slow ballads and kind of chilled back music. Notice that when I'm using sixteenths, those, it sounds like I'm using eighth notes against the metronome. And that's because our metronome is actually counting eighth notes now instead of quarter notes. Again, that's because our new pulse in the six each time signature, because it's called the eighth and the bottom is no eighth notes. And that's probably the most confusing thing about these time signatures, but the eight on the bottom is the fact, you know, counting eighth notes as your pulse or not quarter notes, which we've been doing so far. Once you get your head around that concept, time singers aren't really that. But now you may be thinking what is the difference between 686 for, well, if you played these two beats at the same time, they would actually send the same. If you had the same temple in order for them to send the same, you'd have to be counting the temple at the same time, but one of them would be counting quarter notes. I'm on, we'll be counting eighth notes and that's the main difference in terms of counting them. But also if you were to make this bar of 64 into h naught. So we can see that these thoughts are just grouped as 2s, whereas in the 68, they're grouped has freeze. It really only comes down to the freezing at that point and how you feeling these different time signatures. So on the 168 you'd have a phrase of 3123456123456. And then with 68, you'd have 123456123456. And so it's a slightly different feel. 60 is what we call a compound time signature, is simply means that we have our eighth notes grouped as three's instead of twos or fours. We'll dive deeper into compound times signatures when we start to talk about dotted notes in the advanced notation chapter, we've got our compound time, which is things freezed in three. And then we've got our simple time, which is things phrased into N4, for example, or 64 time signature is our simple time because we can pay our eighth notes in groupings of two, and it looks nice and it works nicely. Other common type signatures are 44345 for basically anything with a four and the bottom at the time signature. Let's do another comparison. If we compare 3468, which technically hold the same amount of eighth notes, we can see the difference if we feel both bars with its nodes. The 34 bar is just counted as 123 and it's got phrases of two. So that means it's a common time signature. While the 68 bars simply counted as 123456. That's because the bottom number on the time signature defines what the beat and the counters. And also because it's in freezers of free, is a compound time signature. Other compound type signatures have a number on the top that's divisible by three, and that's usually got an eight on the bottom number. For example, there's nine-eighths and then there's also 12812 years is a very popular time signature and we're going to talk about it a lot more in the triplet section. But just know it's very, it's very popular in blues music and slow blues. And to get you started, here's a couple of groups that implement that 128 times signature. Well, that is a lot of new information into your brain. I'm so sorry, there's a lot of maths and numbers and stuff, and it is a bit of a brain melting subject. I'm very sorry about that. When you're feeling up for it and you've got over the trauma, that is this lesson. I've got a workbook for you that's great for learning more about these time signatures. There'll be multiple choice questions with different bits and bobs about different time signatures. And hopefully it will build on that knowledge. Feel free to do that in your own time once you've digested all that information. But for now, just chill out, let that soak in and just grab a coffee or a cup of tea. 40. Rhythm Exam 2: Hello and welcome to the second rhythm exam. This is just like the first day of the exam. Apart from we stepped up the level quite a bit, just like the first one though, this is just your chance to check your progress and see how you're getting on and see if you understand everything. So go ahead and download the sheet music is just a snare drum piece and just give it a scan. If there's anything in the sheet music that doesn't really make sense or is a bit confusing, you can always go back to the stuff in the chapter and do a bit of revision. The end goal of this rhythm exam is just to simply play the piece accurately. Now I'm going to play this piece at three different temples so you can hear slow and fast tempos and medium tempo. But before I do that, I'm just going to point out a few things. You want to be aware of, both the rhythm and the accents in this piece. We've also got a lot of dynamics. Barton, and we've got low crescendo, which is where we get loader, which is that little wedge. And then in bar Eleven we've got the two P's, which means we're a very quiet. From bars 15 to 19, we're doing a slow crescendo from PPE, which is very quiet to three Fs or for PTC system or whatever it is, which basically means very low. The more peace there are, the more quiet you are, the more f star, the load you are visiting. Yeah, just look out for those crescendos and those dynamics. And there's one other thing that you might not have seen yet. So as you can see in bar Eleven, we've got a bit of a weird bar line. We've got a thick bar and then it's got this two dots. This is what we call a repeat to mark. Well, you may also notice is at the end of that line there is also the same bar with the two dots. So what we do with these special bar lines is we play along as normal from the repeat bar is at the start on bar 11. And then as we get to the end where it's got the other two dots at the end, the line, we go straight back to the bar 11 and we've got the repeat marks. So any section of music that has got those two bars with the two dots on either side is the section that you want to repeat. I'll draw some arrows so it makes sense, but hopefully you can hear it when you hear me playing along. And that's it. It just make sure you've got the dynamics, you've got the repeat. Good luck with that, and I'll let you hear how it sounds at a slow, medium and fast tempo. 41. Finger Technique and Single Stroke Rolls: As we know, the single stroke roll is just alternating strokes. So right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. Or if we're leading with the left hand, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right. Nothing too crazy there. What we're going to focus on in this lesson is a technique that we can use as can it improve both control and speed of these single stroke roles. And that technique is called the finger technique. As you know, there's a few different ways that we can actually strike the drum with their body. We can use our entire arm and quitting the upper arm. And that's going to produce a very loud, powerful note. But we can't really play fast that way because we're moving such a large mass. We're moving our entire arm. I'm are using large muscle groups which are not as fast but are powerful. The next stage then is we can move down and just use our forearms. And we've still got a lot of power. But again, it's not very fast because we're still using large muscle groups. We can then move further down and use our rest, which is probably 90% of the drumming that you'll do is using rest strokes. That's because it's a nice balance between power and speed and control. Because you're using a fairly small muscle group, but you still got a nice bit of power behind it. The finger technique involves moving the force from the wrist, fingers, and that's where you're going to drive the stick from. The reasoning is because you're using even smaller muscle groups. You have much more speed and control that way. Now I will say using exclusively fingers for playing a single stroke roles is gonna be a very high temperature. So like speed metal temples like 200 BPM plus a lot of you might not want to actually play that fast or might not need to play that fast a lot of the time. But it's important to learn two finger technique because you often use it in conjunction with your wrists. Having that finger control alongside the wrist gives you a nice balance of control, speed, and power. So it's worth learning the finger control for that. It also helps with double stroke roles, which we'll talk about next lesson. Right? Let's learn this finger technique then. With any grip, we want to really nail in that fulcrum point. So the balancing point of the stick, for me, it's around here. It's really important to nail that fulcrum because we're using a lot of rebound in the finger technique. Once you've got your fulcrum, you just put your thumb and index finger on that fulcrum and that's your grip of your stick. And then we just wrap your fingers around and these fingers are gonna be the driving force of the stick. Now when I put these fingers around the stick, I keep a bit of a gap between each finger because that means there's a bit more room to breathe and you're not gripping the stick too hard and it's all compact in a bit tight. But also you don't want to stretch them out so they're uncomfortable. Just have a nice loose grip. That's the important thing here. Just keeping it loose and keeping it relaxed. Like I said, the pinky, the ring finger and the middle finger are the ones really driving the stick. And the thumb and the index finger are the ones keeping the stick in place. Now interestingly enough, when I'm playing with the risks are like this. Just with the rest. I actually put my palm face down on my thumbs on the side of the stick facing that way. But when I use fingertip Nick, I rotate my wrist like this. So the thumbs on top, I'm a palms facing sideways. That way I can get a nice rebound uncontrolled stick nicely with my fingers. Of course, this is just preference and you can still keep it this way. But for demonstration purposes so you can actually see what the fingers are doing. I'm gonna do it this way. And all this technique involves is just striking the drum and using the bug-free fingers to drive the stick back and forth. Just like this. Notice how the sticks moving but I'm not actually moving my wrist. That's all fingers. So here's how it looks. So it's quite a loose and open grip and it's all basically rebound. And you're using these back three fingers to control that rebound and then bring it back and forth. What you don't want to be doing is gripping the stick tightly, clenching your fist like that. Because even just doing that, it's actually hurting my hand. You want to keep it nice and loose and let the stick do the work, and let the gravity and the rebound do all the work. How do we actually build up the finger control and endurance? We need to actually do that. Well, Jojo Mayer, who is a fantastic drummer, has this amazing exercise that I'm going to show you. Now. The way this exercise works is we're just putting straight eighth notes. And we start off by playing with just our thumb, index finger, and middle finger. And that's the one that's driving the stick. So we don't use the other two fingers. And that way we're going to strengthen our middle finger. Once we've done that for a borrower, two, we add our ring finger n. So we've got two fingers driving the sticky note. And we do that for another two bars. And then we add our pinky starts off with just one fingered in the work. Two fingers didn't work. And then finally we add our pinky, that does the work as well. We then go the opposite way and just take away a pinky, then take away our ring finger, and then we're left with just the middle finger didn't work as well. It's a simple exercise in theory, but it's actually quite difficult to do. So it does take a bit of practice. Here we go. Ring finger, pinky, ring finger, the middle finger. Ring finger. Thinking. Ring finger, middle finger. You'll notice that put that quite fast and that's because you need a bit of rebound and a bit of speed to keep that momentum up. So I do apologize. I'll try play it slow for you. Here it is a slower tempo. Ring finger, pinky, ring finger, middle finger. Now that is a tough exercise. So really just focus on getting that fulcrum right. So nicely balanced point and also keeping the grip nice and loose but firm, really focused on the stick control and getting the rebound controlled. And the speed will come. Of course, you want to build these hands equally, so you're gonna do the exact same thing with the left hand as well. Because there's no point in having one really fast hand and then one really slow hand. Because when it comes to grumbles, it's going to send very sloppy. So of course, like all aspects dropping, you want to keep these consistent and equal the entire time. So that way you can become a consistent drummer and it will send a lot more professional. Before I wrap up this lesson, I want to talk about a couple of things that are great for developing speed with a single stroke roles. And a couple of things that you want to be aware of are going to make you sound a lot more professional. I've got three simple exercises for you that are all based around the same concept. The concept is if you do short bursts of fast single stroke roles is going to build up your control speed and endurance a lot quicker than just doing fast single stroke roles for a long time. I'm not going to bother explaining the exercises because they are very simple in terms of notation than what you're actually playing. The hard part is building up the speed and also try out different techniques. So when I'm putting this the eighth notes I'm doing with the wrists. Then the last 16th note bursts are doing with a combination of either fingers or fingers and wrists are struggling with doing the finger technique for now, you can absolutely use the risks, but you'll find as you get to have higher temples, it'll be quite hard. But of course, a lot of the time you played drums, you're not gonna be doing this mad fast stuff. So it's not a super, super important thing to get 240 BPM single strokes or wherever these exercises are great as just a warm-up or just going through different techniques such as the finger technique, the rest technique, or a combination of the two. The final thing I want to talk about is how to get a good sound out your single stroke roll. And it's stuff we pretty much covered already, but I just want to go over again. The first thing I want to talk about is of course, no consistency. And what I mean by that is of course the notes are in time and they're always equally spaced from each other. So you're not going to like, but instead you're doing a steady rhythm like this. That's the first thing you can do to make it sound much more professional and much more high standard. The second thing is making sure that your stick hates when you come up and play, each stroke are the same. You don't really want it where 1 sixth really quite high and wants to exploit lowly this. Because that obviously creates an uneven sound. You want to make sure each thick comes down from the same height. And that you can visually see by just looking at where the tip is and where it comes up too. And you can adjust it as you go. A great way to do this is to get a mirror and put it next to you while you're playing and practicing on a practice pad or in a snare drum or whatever. Then you can actually see quite clearly if one sticks higher than the other and then you can adjust accordingly. When you're starting out, you'll find that your lead hands probably more powerful. And you just want to make sure that evens out as you go. Third thing is making sure that your left hand is a strong and powerful as your right hand. The best way of doing that is just doing all the exercises that we did in this lesson. And it's refreshing the sticking. So you start with a left hand. So it's gone. So it's just the same exercises but you've just switched the sticking around so that every left-hand stroke is now right-hand stroke. And every rate and stroke is a left hand stroke. Doing these exercises with your left hand lead is going to strengthen your weekend So the roles become much more consistent. It's also going to allow you to do some interesting and cool sounding things. When it comes to the drum kit and soloing, you're gonna be able to do more interesting phrasings because your left hand is powerful and it can lead things. And that's about it really just keep a loose grip when you're doing your finger technique, makes sure that your stick heights are even. And you want to practice with your left hand as well. And those are the recipes for fast single stroke rules. That is the base for my daughter. Hello, you. 42. Double Stroke Rolls: Alright, we've looked at the single stroke roll, which is one note per hand. So right, left, right, left, right, left. If you're starting with a right hand or left, right, left, right, left, right. Now it's time to look at the double stroke rope. As you can imagine, the single stroke roll is just one note per hand. The double stroke roll is two notes by hand. So it's going right, right, left, left, right, right, left, left, left, left, right, right, left, right, left, right rate. The single and double stroke roll rudiments are just so important to learn. The single and double stroke roll are used as building blocks for other different rudiments such as the power doodle. But also they're great for increasing speed and the drum kit increasing control and also increasing endurance. All of these are great things obviously. In this lesson I'm going to show you the basic rid of it. And I'm also going to show you a technique that you can use similar to the finger control technique that's just going to increase the speed, wafer the riff. Let's simply look at the rudiment first. Well, I've got for you here is just two bars of eighth notes. The first bar is just single stroke roles, and the second bar is double stroke rules when you're playing the doubles in this exercise, just play Phil restaurants to get you started. We're going to get into a different technique in a second. You should practice this by bleeding with the right hand first and then leading with the left hand as well. As always want to build these hands equally. Before we talk about the technique, There's one other thing I want to mention. There's a couple of different ways that we can actually notate these double stroke roles. The first way is simply just notating out every single note. So for example, we've got a bar vehicles and then a bar of 16th notes. And 16th notes are played as double strokes. The second version is the one I'm going to focus on in this lesson. This is where we put a line for the stems of the notes that we want to add a double stroke into. So what I'm gonna do is change this barf, eighth and 16th notes into just two bars of eighth notes, but the second bar has the strikes through them. What that means is we actually play them are 16th notes, but it's just a little easier to read sometimes, if you ever see these strikes through the stems of the notes, just know that you're actually doubling the speed because you're actually playing two notes within that OneNote. It can be quite handy at times, but sometimes you don't need it. It's just something you should be aware of. In this lesson, I'm going to use that notation just so you can get used to it. Now we've got all that out the way. Let's talk about the technique. Just like the first example I showed you of the double stroke roll, you can actually use full risk strokes to get the two strokes over each hand like this. That's a great thing to practice when you started off with this rudiment. It allows you to get used to the hand pattern, but it can be quite limiting when you want to get faster. If I tried to play a double stroke rule really fast by using full risk strokes, it can be quite challenging and you'll probably end up with a sore wrists if you try it. It's really hard. Well, I'm going to show you today is essentially a trick that's going to allow you to get two notes over a single stroke. That's effectively going to half your workloads to get the two strokes. So a comparison between the food restaurants and the technique I'm going to show you. We'll start off with food restaurants. If we compare it to the technique I'm going to show you. Right? So let's talk about how we do this. We'll just set the finger technique we learned in the last lesson. It's all about Neil in that fulcrum point and using the weight of the stick to do other work and also controlling the rebound to get the most out of the stick. So I want you to do is just use your pad or snare drum or whatever, and just strike the drum and let it bounce. If it's a good point in the fulcrum, it should do a lot of bonuses like that. Once you're happy with that, what we're gonna do is let the stick hit once with the initial strike and then bounce again once. And then we're going to ****** a stick away and stop the benzene. So we get the two hits from the one stroke. Then ****** away, one to ****** away, one to ****** it away. And that's the base attendee restrict our drum as normal with the fingers and the wrist. And then we let it bounce once and then bring the stick backup by snatching the fingers. We want to practice that, but the left hand as well. One thing you don't want to do when you're practicing this is totally letting go of the stick with your free fingers, with your free control fingers, you want to make sure they're still on the snake and they're just controlling the rebound. Once you're confident in doing that with both hands separately, the next thing to do is string them together and get a consistent rule. Don't worry too much about tempore anything, just get a consistent rule. I am slightly exaggerating the movements for demonstration purposes. The key is just to make sure that it's nice and loose, but still firm. And you're still holding the stick and it's not moving all over the place. And making sure that you're in control with the fingers. If you've practiced your finger technique from the last lesson, this should be a lot easier. A simple exercise I've got for you is where we play eighth notes. And then we play 16th notes of double stroke rules. Now the purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that you're actually keeping the wrist movements playing eighth notes. But you're actually going to do 16th notes with your hands because you're going to do double strokes, going to get two strokes OF those eighth notes. It's probably easier to actually see what I'm talking about. So I'll just play it for you. Notice that my wrists are not going to really change speed, but when I do the double stroke rules, It's actually more of the fingers that are doing the work and controlling the rebound. So when a transition from eighth notes to playing 16th note doubles, the risks are pretty much staying the same. Now just take that slow and keep it relaxed and just focus on getting that rebound and controlling that rebound. That is the key to this technique. Now when you want to actually increase the speed, what you can do to help you is you can actually add a bit of pressure with your thumb and your index finger when you do that initial stroke. So instead of this, which is totally loose, you can do this, which is just adding a bit of pressure and the rebounds or just a bit quicker. And that'll help when you do start to speed it up. Now when you're practicing this to begin with, you're probably going to notice that you're going to have inconsistent notes when it comes to volume of the notes. So it's gonna be suddenly like this. Which is like the debt, the debt, the debt to debt. Because the second note of the double is quiet because it's just a rebound stock. Now this is a bit more advanced for when you've nailed that initial technique. But what you can do for that second revenge strike is you can actually snap your fingers to get a loader note for the second note is that just grabbing the steak. You can do this. Which creates two consistent notes, which sounds a lot more clean when you do this double stroke rules. So instead of you get, it's called the open-close techniques. So you can opening the hand and then closing it again for the second stroke. Now this is a very hard technique, so don't get upset if you can't do it immediately. Just really focus on nailing that fulcrum point, working on the finger technique and just getting that bounce and just snatching the stick up after two hits. And then as you get that control of the stick, the speed will come. Once you do know that technique though, it means that you can play eighth note. So this means you get double the amount of notes. Say that though. There's one more thing I want to show you before we wrap up this lesson. What I've got for you is a little snare drum pieces, not very long. It's eight bars or something, and it's just a practice your double stroke roles to this snare drum pieces can the building control that's going to allow you to transition between single strokes and double strokes. So have some fun with that and take it slow. Practice both your finger technique and know that open-close technique. And if you practice those two and get them really tight, you're going to be at an incredibly fast, uncontrolled drummer. 43. The Paradiddle: Alright guys, how's it going today? I want to talk about the periodontal, the power to do it was one of my favorite rid of it. I use it all the time and it is so versatile, which we'll talk about in the next lesson. But for now, we're just going to learn the pattern. The power to do is a combination of single stroke roles and also double strokes. So the entire pattern is right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left. The parotid duct is only four minutes long, but we've actually got a right-hand lead, which is the right-left rate rate. Then we've also got the same thing, but leading with the left, which is left, right, left, left. And we usually play Those two things, one after another. 90% of the time we're just going to be doing right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, left. But sometimes a parent, it could just be right-left rate right or left, right, left, left by itself. Just to be aware of that paradox can be played at any node value because they are just hand pattern. But most of the time we're playing them as 16th notes. So let's just practice that on the snare drum. When I practice prior to this, I often accident the first note of every paradisal pirate did that. Right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, right, left, right, left. So we exit the first note of every pair of doodles. The parity, those are fantastic. We jump into practice because you're doing single stroke roll, so you've got the right-left. We've also got the double stroke roles, which are the right rate and the left, left. And also what you're doing is you're bouncing from lead hand to lead Han. So you've gone from right-hand lead to left hand lead and U-boats and back. And that's going to build the hands equally, which is very important. Now this is a short lesson just to get you familiar with the power to do next lesson, we're gonna be talking about how we can actually apply it to the kit. For now, just get used to practicing the hand pattern and get used to it and get a feel for it. And then we'll move on to actually playing on the drum kit. 44. Applying the Paraddidle: In the last lesson, I introduced you to the periodontal, which is a fantastic rid of it. And hopefully by now you've got the sticking and you've got a good feel for it. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a few concepts that are going to bring to life this parotid on the drum kit. Now for this video are using the concepts with the periodontal. But these concepts really do apply for any root of n that you want to apply to the drum kit. They're just great for if you've learned in your retirement and you don't know what to do with it, just apply these concepts and you've already got a few uses for the ribbon on the drum kit. In this lesson, we're applying all these concepts to the periodontal. But just be aware you can apply these concepts to any other redeeming and it should sound pretty decent. I'm going to show you a couple of groove concepts that are going to apply the periodontal to agree of context. And also a couple of fill concepts that do the same thing and apply the parent adult to Phil's. What we're gonna do is very simple. All we're gonna do is take our right hand from the snare drum and move it up to the high hat. So we've now got our pirate. It'll split between two voices on the drum kit. We've got it split between the hi-hat on the right hand and left hand on the snare drum. And if we play this parallel between these two voices as 16th notes, that sounds really cool. And what I like to do is actually make the left-hand ghost notes apart from the two and the four back beats. And all we need to do after that is add some bass drums in there. We've got a really funky sounding groove. And that is just the power of that, or it's just split over two voices on the drum kit. Of course it doesn't have to be the hi-hat and the snare, but that's a great starting point. The next concept I've got for you is where we replaced the right hand at the rudiment as a base drum. So instead of going right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left, which is the parent adult we're going based lift-based based left, left, left. So all we've done is replaced the right-hand with a bass drum. And again, when I play this, I like to ghost most of the notes on the left hand, apart from for the accents on the two and the four. That way the group is a bit more dynamic and it's a bit more interesting to listen to. Once you've got that down, you can add a right hand on the right symbol or the hi-hat, playing quarter notes or eighth notes. And you've got yourself a killer groove. Now that group is actually very similar to the immigrant song by Led Zeppelin. So if you're feeling brave and you want to burn your right foot off, give that a bash. So there are a couple of things that you can do to apply a pirated O2, a groove. And like I said, you can apply that to other rudiments. I'd see what happens and have some fun with it. But now we're going to talk about how we can apply the power to do to some fills. What we can firstly do is keep the left hand on the snare drum and we can move the right-hand around the toms or symbols or whatever, just different parts of the drum kit. And you've immediately got an interesting sounding fill. Here's a couple of examples of how we can use that. Another way we can use the power to do is we have our snare drum and we keep both her hands there. And that's our kind of home-based for our hands. And we play our part to do on the snare drum, but on the accents. So the first beat of every paragraph, dorsal, right, left, right, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. We actually move these hands to different parts and the drum kit. For example, the right-hand can go to the four term for the accent, and the left hand can go up to one of the other terms for the other accent. Here's a few examples of how we can use that. Alright, hopefully that gives you a few ideas to get you started on how you can actually apply rudiments and specifically the parallel to the drum kit. The key to this is just learning the rhythm. And first, before you apply to the drum kit, once you've got that power to do, is you're going to be very simple concepts and you should have no bother with it. We have some fun with that. Jam along to some tunes explored the drum kit a bit more. Explore for yourself how you can use the power to do and maybe even challenge yourself to a little challenge such as, I'm going to play a drum solo just involving paralegals. It's a great way to improve your knowledge of the Perdido and also improve your creativity. 45. The 5 Stroke Roll: Alright, next up in our list of rudiments we want to learn is the five stroke role. As the name suggests, we have five notes in this rudiment. The sticking of the five stroke roll is right, right, left, left, right, or left, left, right, right, left. It's really just to double stroke roles and then a single to end it. And that single stroke roll is usually accented. The nice thing about the five stroke role is that you're actually change lead hand every time you do the root of it. So you go right, right, left, left, right, and then left, left, right, right, left. You go back and forth with the lead time. Here's had the rudiments sounds. Just practice the sticking by itself with no match norm or anything. And then once you've got that down, we can focus on how we're going to actually apply it to tempo and note values and things. A nice way to get the Feistel grow into an actual temple is to play this simple rhythm first. For those first two notes, the 2 eighth notes, we're going to add doubles to those as our five-year rule. Here's how it sounds. That there is how we can actually apply the five stroke rule to a temple and add to give it some values. I highly recommend you practice that and make sure that you're changing lead hand every time you do the face real grow. In the next lesson we're gonna be talking about how we can apply it to the drum kit. One thing I want to mention before we wrap up though, is that we're gonna be doing some stuff that involves doing semiquavers, but doing the doubles in those semiquavers. Because we're doubling up semiquavers, that means we're actually playing thirty-seconds notes, and that is nu naught value. I wouldn't worry too much about it because it's usually played at slower tempos. And just think of it as playing 16th notes with tourists and then just adding double strokes to that. If we play that same rhythm but using the same quivers and eighth notes, then double it up. You can see it's not actually too confusing and it sounds the same. It's just at a slower tempo. Don't be intimidated by it because we're gonna be using in the next lesson, we're gonna get more in depth with it and you'll see how it's actually used. So get learning that face regrow. And once you're happy, you can move on to the next lesson and bring it to the drum kit. 46. Applying the 5 Stroke Roll: Alright, now you've got your first stroke roll down. Let's apply it to the drum kit. I really like to use the five stroke roll is a little embellishment when you're grooving to her like an eighth note groove, it creates a little sparkle, you know, and your groove, and it just makes things a bit more interesting. Can use it on the hi-hat, you can use it between the ride cymbal and the hi-hat snare drum in the high hat, There's lots of different combinations. Here's a few that incorporate the hi-hat and the snare in grooves. You don't have to play those exactly how the retina, you can change the orchestration so you can put on the hi-hat, maybe the right symbol or two toms or anything you want. You can also incorporate the thigh stroke roll into a drum fill. Here's a couple of drum fills you can use. There's a few examples of how you can use the pastoral role in a group. Or I felt there's no real secret here. All you have to do is just mess around for awhile. Create your own little freezers or five stroke roles. Maybe Peter on the offbeats or different parts of the semiquaver, really just mess around and have fun with it. Even if you just put on a backing track and just start doing the five stroke roll and start it in different places. Once you've got some phrases, you can try and move that around the drum kit and see what sounds good to you. You'll find things you like and you'll find things that you don't like. So just have some fun and explore. The next lesson we're gonna be looking at the seven stroke roll. 47. The 7 Stroke Roll: Hello and welcome back to another lesson on another rudiment. Today we're looking at the seventh stroke rule, which by the sign of the name you can guess has seven strokes in it, just like the five-year grow, the second stroke roll is just simply made of doubles and singles. In this case we're doing three double strokes and then one single stroke. The sticking is right, right, left, left, right, left, or left, left, right, right, left, left, right. So it's just 1234567 or 1234567. Let's see how that pattern looks and the snare drum. Just at the face to grow, just practice with a metronome or any timing, just get the hand pattern down. And once you have that hand pattern down, we can look at the regimen in context, just like the five-year-old girl, we can start off with the skeleton rhythm and then add a double strokes. In this case, the skeleton rhythm is just x naught. So I'm not going to bother plane that for you. What we can do with those eighth notes though, is we can double up the first free. I'll leave the last one as a single, and that is the last accent of the seventh row grill. Unlike the five stroke row, which changes lead hand every time the seventh little girls stays in the same lead hand as you do it. So be sure to practice both the right-hand lead on the left hand lead of the seven stroke roll. That is one variation of the seventh stroke roll where you've got the free doubles and then the single. But you can also do is have the single stroke first and then do the free doubles. You practice both those variations because they're both very handy. Go have some fun with that and go practice it. Our next lesson, we're going to be checking out onto the drum kit. 48. Applying the 7 Stroke Roll: It feels a bit like Deja vu, but we've learned the seven stroke roll and we're now going to apply it to the drum kit. The principle is the exact same as the Feistel grow. We're just going to add it to the snare drum and the high hat, the right symbol in different drums and just see how it sounds. I've got a few examples of a groove contexts and also a couple of fills. As always, these examples are just to get you started and it's really about experiment in for yourself. Here's a few examples of how you can use the seventh stroke role in a group context. I love using 57 for girls in my groups. In that way, using the hi-hat for little flourishes and stuff. It makes groups and a lot more complicated than they actually are. All you're really doing is just adding a couple of rudiments to it. Alright, here's a couple of fill ideas using the seven stroke roll. Again, it's a similar vibe to the fives to grow. It just lasts a bit longer. The key to this is just learning the rudiments like the back of your hand. And if you do that, it's gonna be a lot easier if you're struggling with this stuff, just go back to the retirement and just practice that a bit more. I'm coming back to this. Hopefully that gives you a basic understanding of the 57 stroke rules. And honestly, if you learn them, you're going to see a massive difference to your drumming. Next, we're gonna be looking at Buzz roles. 49. The Buzz Roll: Hello folks. I hope you're doing well. Today. We're gonna be talking about bus rolls. Past roles are a drummers way of sustaining a note on the drum. You know, if you watch a movie or a TV show and someone says drumroll and they go on the snare drum, that is a buzzer. All the bizarro can also be called the multiple ventral. The way we notate a bus row is simply by putting almost like a Z shape on the stem of the note that we're buzzing. And we'll often see many notes in succession with the Buzz rule symbol. If you ever see that notation of the Z, just know it's for a bus rule. Let's get behind the kit and I'm going to show you how you play a bus row. Firstly, let's hear what our buzzer or sinus ache, right? That's what a buzzword sentence like. And how do we actually achieve that? Well, first we're going to start quite simple. We're going to just play 16th notes with our hands, just alternating strokes. But instead of using the risks, we're going to use a bit more arm. So the leverage is coming more from the elbow. Now obviously that's fairly simple, but what we're going to do now is we're going to actually tighten the fulcrum point where they're from. And also with the middle finger. I'm going to play that again. And notice this is gonna be quite a dead sending single stroke roll because we're not actually doing the buzzers yet. Now obviously that doesn't sound great. But what we're doing is we're using that fulcrum point. And we're tightening up that to give it a bit more tension. Tightening up that fulcrum point allows us to have faster rebounds and quicker notes. We just simply mess around with how tape recording our fingers and the fulcrum point. And eventually you'll find your sweet spot. Now when you're starting, a great thing to do is just play the edge of the snare drum because there's a bit more snare response and there's a lot more bounce. And that way you can feel where the buzzer all is. What I'll do is I'll mess around with my hands and find that sweet spot by just adjusting how tight I'm using that fulcrum. Notice that my hands aren't going to change speed. It all comes from the rebounds. What you want to hear is a consistent note. You don't want any pulsing between the hands where it's like kind of going up and down in volume and consistency. You just want to have a nice smooth note. Although your hands are gonna be quite tight when you play, this is still want to have a bit of movement and you want to keep it loose and relaxed. Here we go. It's often easier when you have your hands going faster, but just to get used to the actual movement and the tension in your hands, just play it slowly. And that is the bus rule. Just mess around with tensions in your hand and get the most out of your stroke. This is quite hard to practice on a practice pad because you really need the snare drum to help you because the snare wires are vibrating. And that's where the bus sudden comes from. But good luck with that and have some fun with it. 50. Flams: In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about flaps, floods or are fantastic, we're doing forget a fatter signed at the drugs. The flame is played as two separate notes in the hands. The flam is notated as a normal note. But prior to that nodes, you've got a small grace note. If you ever see that little mini note before the big naught, that means you're playing a flat. That rotation will make sense once you add, you understand what the flap is. So let's get behind the kit and talk about it. Before we talk about anything. Let's hear about the flam sounds like as you can hear, it adds a lot of fatness and body to the snare drum is great for Iraq stuff because you've got a big slab from the snare drum and it just sends fantastic, how do we actually play the flam then, like I said in the intro, we've got two notes, but I like to think of the flam as just one single note, but you do use two notes in the sticks. The flam consists of a grace note, which is a very quiet note, followed by a main stroke. These are almost played at the same time. So it does sound like OneNote, but you're using two strokes. The easiest way to achieve this is to have the hand is doing the grace note quite low to the drum and have the main load and have that higher above the drum, and then drop them at the same time. When you do that, the grace note will come down first and it'll be nice and quiet while this one will come all the way down from here and there'll be second, but we'll also be louder and more powerful. This is a right-hand flam, because the right hand is coming down as the main accent. The left-hand flam is the same thing. Our left hand comes up on. Our right hand is the one that's doing the grace note. You don't want to happen is for the drumsticks to come down at the exact same time and hit the drum at the same time. Contrary to what you might think, this actually thins out the drum and just makes it sound a bit weak. What you want is OneNote after the other in quick succession. Now the actual time between the grace note and the main stroke is up to interpretation. You could have the two strokes quite close together and get a nice tight sound. Or you can play them slightly apart for a more loose, sloppy field, which can be good in some contexts. I'll let you hear the difference between a tight flam and a loose plan. It's a fairly subtle difference. But when you're playing music and you hear it in context, there is a slight difference and it does create a different vibe for the music. There's no right or wrong answer. It just depends on the musical context. For example, if you're in a marching band at probably used the type flam and get it nice and clean cut and just sounding very tight. Whereas if you're playing in a latin band, jazz band, you can get away with a bit more. So you can probably do the looser flam and get a fatter sound. You should practice the right and left-hand lamps individually. And then once you're happy, you can string them together to go right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. Now when you're doing back-and-forth lamps, a good thing to get used to. It's the movement of going back and forth. What I mean by this is the stick movement. So when you come up for your first lab, your right-hand flam, you starting like this. You go down for the flam. And then afterwards, this left hand goes up and the right hand stays down. And that's you ready for the left-hand flam. And that comes back down. Bam, bam. And then your right hand comes down, up, sorry. You just keep doing that. Just like that. So becomes a back-and-forth motion. That's the basics of the flower. Here's a couple of exercises you can do are going to build that coordination in the hands. In the first exercise, we're just going through different permutations of the farms in eighth notes, I recommend repeating each bar before you move on to the next one. The next example I've got for you is again, ethos. But what we're doing is we're doing the flaps on the beat, so 1234. And then we're also doing a bar of offbeat flags. Once you have the basics of the flam, I really do recommend trying out these exercises. If you're feeling brave, you can try out these little films that I've got that are implementing the flam into the drum kit. The fun thing about the flam is you don't have to play it on the same surface like the snare drum or the tall. You can split two over two surfaces are really great use for this is splitting the left-hand flam between the floor tom and the snare drum. If you look closely at the notation, you see that the gray snow is now on the floor, tom. And the main stroke is still on the left hand and is on the snare drum. And that's how we can tell if firms are split between different parts of the drum kit. We can just look at the grace note and the main note. And that's about it for firms and actually rudiments as well. So we've covered a lot of rudiments. And the great thing about firearms, singles and doubles, is that they make up most of the other regimens. Once you've got those basics, then you really can go ahead and learn all the other regimens. So have some fun with those flags because once you get it, It's very satisfying. Just whacking the snare drum with the flag. Next, I'm gonna be doing a little short lesson on how we can develop hand speed with rudiments. 51. Building hand speed using rudiments: Alright guys, how's it going? I want to make a little snappy lesson for you guys that's just going to show you three different exercises that are just going to blow your hand speed, wave for the roof. They're going to really speed up your hands. And they're very simple to learn, but very hard to master. I'm not going to ramble on about it too much. I'm just going to show you the exercises and let you get on. Even if you practice these 510 minutes a day before you start gentle onto tunes, it's gonna make a huge difference to your playing. And like I said, they are very simple these exercises, and they just involve three different regiments. So you've got your single stroke roll, the double stroke role, and your periodontal. Let's do that first exercise. The first example is very simple. We're just playing 16th notes and it's a bar long. And we've got two beats, a single stroke roles, and then two beats of double stroke rules. And you can start on the right hand, and then you can start on the left hand as well. The second example of coffee is two bars long, and it's again just 16th notes. What we've got for the first part is just three beats of single stroke roll started with the right hand. And then the final b is just a pirated as we're going right, left, right rate. And that leads us to the second bar to lead with our left hand. The second bar is the same thing as the first bar, apart from her leading with our left hand. Now, we've got three beats that are single stroke rules and that's led with the left hand. And then for the final beat of the second bar, we've got a left, right, left, left periodontal. And that brings us back to the start of the first bar. This is a fantastic one because you're building your hands equally and you've got training in both right-hand and left-hand leaf. The third and final exercise I've got for you is once again two bars long way to 16th notes. This exercise is going to allow you to transition between different rudiments smoothly. What we've got for the first part is the exact same as the first exercise. We've got two beats of single stroke roles and then two beats of double stroke roles. And then for the second part, we're just didn't pirated goods for the entire thing. So there you go. That's the three exercises for you. Like I said, they're simple to learn but hard to master. You can get a ton of mileage out of these exercises because I still use them today. And because you can just speed them up. As you speed up, they're always going to be a challenge. I really do recommend you try these exercises out for like 510 minutes before you get to the kit? Maybe on the practice pad on your knees or whatever. And in a couple of weeks you'll see that your hands are just a lot quicker. And there you've got a lot more endurance. So definitely check them out and I'll see you in the next lesson. 52. Rudimental rip A snare drum piece: Hello and welcome to the rudimentary ripped lesson. This is essentially another rhythm exam, but I just want to give it a cool name. What I've got for you is three different difficulties for the same snare drum piece. Drum pieces involve a red rudiments, hence the name. We've got an easy one, a medium one, and a hard one. So I recommend you start off with the easy one. And once you've nailed that before into the medium, and then finally the hard one. Once you're feeling very confident with these rudiments, there's nothing in these pieces that we've not covered. It's just sitting down and actually learning the pieces and learning the sticking. And if you get that right, then you're gonna be able to play the piece. So download the sheet music and Nakoda in and start learning them. 53. What are Triplets : In this lesson, we're gonna be learning a bit about triplets. Triplets are fantastic rhythms that are used all the time in music. In a nutshell, we use triplets to squeeze three equally spaced notes into a space that would normally fit. Two nodes, will learn more about that in a bit. But first, let's look at how triplets look on paper. As you can see, triplets can come in many different forms. They are not specific to one naught value, but rather are a tool for expression that you can employ with any different null value. There are a couple of different ways to notate triplets. In this first example, we've got a bracket that contains the three naughts and it's got a three in the middle of that. And the second example just has a number of free over the stems. You'll find both in use regularly. As I said, triplets are used when we want to cram three notes into the space of two nodes. What does this actually mean? Well, let's look at one example of an eighth note triplet. As you can see, there are 3 eighth notes in the triplet group has free. The real value of this group of triplets is equal to two the naught values within the triplet. In this case, we have eighth note triplets. So we just take these events triplets times it by two, and that's our value of the triplet. So that means this triplet has the total value of one quarter note or 2 eighth notes. You can use that same method for other triplets to 16th note triplets have the value of 2 16th notes, or 1 eighth note. Or an OK chip bits have the value of two quarter notes or 1.5 note. All we're doing is looking at the notes within the triplet and taken to them. And that is our value of the triplet. Quarter, eighth, and 16th note triplets are the three main ones you'll be using. We'll focus on them in this chapter. For now, let's move back to the eighth note triplet. Now we know that this triplet has the same value as 2 eighth notes or one-quarter note. What this means is this triplet lasts or pizza long. How do we count these eternal triplets then? The way I like to create them as like this, one, trip lit to trip, flipped three, trip lit for trip. Let match your basic eighth note triplet can't practice this rhythm on the snare drum to get used to devising the pulse into three. Let's combine the eighth note triplets with some caution notes for some simple rhythms on the snare drum. That's your basics of the eighth note triplet in which all three notes are played. However you can add rests within the triplets. You can't use the exact same way as you would with a normal triplet nodes. Here's a few examples of how you can use rests within the triplets. Hopefully that gives you a basic grasp of eighth note triplets. Let's move on to 16th note triplets. These are very similar to the eighth note triplets, but instead of the three notes lasting one beat, the last for half a beat. So these three notes are crammed into 2 16th notes or an eighth note. You can count 16th note triplets like this. One, trip lit and trip lit to triplet and trip lit three, trip lit and trip lit for triplet. Triplet. These are a lot of fun to play and are very useful. So be sure to practice them slowly and load. Looking at this bar of triplets can be a bit of a headache. So we can use sex tuplets to clean it up. Six tablets are very similar to triplets. It's almost as if we've glued to the 16th note triplet groups together to make it a group of six, sound the same, but the sex tuplets look a little cleaner. You can also count them the same way as well. Sex tuplets are six notes squeezed into four. In this case, the six semiquaver sex tuplets are squeezed into four semiquavers. So that means this six notes equal one beat. Sex tuplets are usually played as semiquavers. So for now you don't really have to worry about any others. Here's a couple of different combinations of eighth notes and 16th note, triplets and sex tuplets. There's just one thing I want to mention before I wrap up this lesson, a lot of new students often get confused when they see, let's see, 3 eighth notes in a grouping of three in 68. The optimistic, this group of free as a triplet because it's got three notes in the gripping. I just want to mention that it's not a triplet. The reason it's not a triplet is because it's not three naught squeezed into the space of two, but rather just free notes grouped together. If it was a triplet, it would have a three above the stem. And also it'd be spaced over 2 eighth notes. It's just something to be aware of, so don't get confused by freezers are free and triplets, They are different things. That is your basics for the triplets. We'll be looking at the quarter note triplet in a separate video as it's a little bit harder. But for now, practice both for eighth note triplet and the 16th note triplets. 54. 1/4 Note Triplets: In this lesson I want to talk about quarter note triplets. Now agape corner note triplets its own lesson because it is very confusing when you're first starting out, unlike 16th note triplets and eighth note triplets, is not contained within one beat. Quarter note triplets are over two beats. What we're doing is fitting three quarter notes into the space of two coordinates, because it's over those two beats, it can be quite confusing to count out to help you get through this and learn how to play coordinate triplets. I've got this simple process you can do. The first step to this process is just by playing eighth note triplets. To help you with the exercises the metronome is counting every single eighth note triplet. Now that is nothing new, that is just eighth note triplets plead a single strokes. The next stage of the process is to keep that eighth note triplet going alternating strokes. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna acts in every two triplets. Now notice that when you're playing these eighth note triplets, your accents are always going to land on your lead hand. Now that accident you're hearing is actually what the quarter note triplet is. So if you take away the notes that are in-between those accents, you've got your quarter note triplet. You should definitely practice that exercise quite a bit because it allows you to tune your ears to really hear what a quarter note triplet sounds like against the metronome. So make sure you dial that in. Now the final stage is taken with the notes are in-between those accents. The only thing you need to change is instead of just playing the right hand, you play an alternating strokes. But if you practice that previous exercise and you're used to hide the quarter note triplet sounds, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. That really is the best way of thinking about the quarter note triplet is like eighth note triplets, but you're just taken away every second note. So go ahead and try that process out. If you're struggling with one stage of the process, just go back to the previous one and just learn that first and get that really tight and really memorized and then move on to the next one. And of course you can program your metronome to count triplets along with you. And now you can play 16th note triplets, eighth note triplets, and now quarter note triplets. That's the three main ones you want to learn. If you really want to melt your brain though, and you want to get used to playing these triplets and different subdivisions. I've got an exercise for you. All we're doing is replacing two bars, a quarter note triplets, then two bars of eighth note triplets, and then two bars of 16th note triplets. And then we go back down again to two bars of eighth note triplets, and then finally two bars, a quarter note triplets. And we can go up and down those norovirus as much as we want. And we can get really used to playing and changing these subdivisions within the triplets. I do recommend you give it a try, but it is quite hard. So make sure you play it slow. And you get used to the triplets in the subdivisions against the four, four-dimensional. That's the hard part. And of course you can keep the left foot going on the quarter note as well. And that is your basics of triplets. Now we're gonna be looking at how we can apply them to grooves and fills. 55. Shuffle Groove: In this lesson, we're gonna be doing the basics of the shuffle groove. As a drummer, the shuffle groove is something you really want to learn. You use the shuffle rhythm in rock and roll, in blues music and country music, lots of different things. So it really is a valuable thing to learn. The nice thing is the basic shuffle groove is not that difficult. Now we call this a shuffle groove because it incorporates a very specific rhythm that is called a shuffle. And without that rhythm is not really a shuffle. Now what is that shuffle pattern? Well, let's just start by playing eighth note triplets on the hi-hat. And of course we count them as one triplet, triplet, triplet, triplet, but I'll program the metronome so it counts every triplet. Now that's fine by itself, but that's not a shuffle rhythm. What we do to meet that a shuffle rhythm is simply by taking the middle triplet out of each grouping. So now instead of playing every eighth note triplet, like this, one, triplet, triplet, triplet, triplet. We're now going to just play the first and last triplet of every grouping. So one triplet, triplet, triplet, triplet, one. Here, That sounds. And again, the metronome is playing all the triplets, so you can see what's missing and what's not. Now there's a couple of ways you can actually write this rhythm out. You can make it so the two triplet notes in the grouping are not connected at all. And you've just got a bracket that tells you the triplets there. Or you can write it the way I prefer, which is you actually connect these two triplets. And then you have a note or rest in the middle. It's a bit nicer to look at, in my opinion because it still looks like a triplet, but you're just missing that middle note. And that is the shuffle rhythm. To make it a groove, all we do is add a snare of the two and the four. Then a bass drum on the 13. The shuffle really comes from the right hand because that's doing all the triplet stuff. The bass drum and the snare drum. They're just playing quarter notes, 1234. And then there's the shuffle and the kind of loose feel comes from that right hand doing the triplets. Here's a couple of different variations of the shuffle groove. There you go. That is the basic shuffle groove. In the next chapter, we're going to be looking at shuffles a bit more in depth, but for now hopefully that gets you started. I just practiced that just doing the hi-hat pattern really by itself. And then incorporate the other limbs. And honestly we put some blue stuff on and just shuffle away a slow tempo, make it nice and loose and sloppy. It will sound really awesome. In the next lesson, we're gonna be looking at the swing groove. 56. Swing Groove: Okay, Let's talk about the swing groove. The swing groove is the bread and butter for jazz music, it really is the gateway into jazz. And the nice thing is it's not too complicated, but you can get a lot of mileage out of it. You can play a lot of music with this basic beat. And there's different variations that will go into the next chapter. But let's just focus on learning that basic groove. Now in most modern music, the hi-hat is the primary symbol that you use. Most groups incorporate the hi-hat, but in jazz, we use the ride cymbal. The right symbol is really the main thing you need to be using in jazz. If you go listen to some jazz music like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, all that stuff. You'll find that the rights and what was very prominent in the music. My favorite symbol on the drum kit is the right symbol. I think it's so versatile. And so that's why I like playing jazz. Anyway, let's get into the swing of things. Hahaha, really bad pun. The swing group is not too dissimilar from the shuffle groove. The swing group starts with the quadrant on the right cymbal. And then we do a little shuffle for the two. And then we go back to the quarter note for the three. And then a shuffled for the, for. The rhythm on the right symbol is one, triplet, triplet free. Trip. For trip. That sounds pretty jazzy. Now that is your bread and butter. You could play a jazz song by just doing that by itself, adds a little accent and doing different signs on the right cymbal. And that would get you by, you know. But we're going to add some more things to make it a bit more interesting, as well as the ride cymbal, another telltale sign that you're playing jazz is putting a left fruit hi-hat on the two and the four. And that is one of the most common things you're hearing jazz as well. Let's combine that right symbol pattern with the two in the four and the hi-hat. Wildly to do is actually add the two and the four and the symbol. And that just creates a bit more movement in the groove. That's what I like to call the skeleton beat. You've got your ride cymbal going and you've got your left foot going on the two into four. And that will get you by. What a lot of jazz drummers do is keep that going constantly and then improvise with the left hand and the right foot on the bass drum. Now that is a lot more advanced, so we're going to keep it simple for now. That improvisation with the left hand and right, it's called comping. So if you did want to get into it, you can just look up jazz comping on the drums. For now. We're going to keep it basic. And what we're gonna do with the bass drum is we're going to add a four on the floor. So we're just going to play every quarter note. Now the thing about Jan's is it's quite subtle, it's quite dynamic. So you don't want to play a nice light symbol on the right and then playing nice light on the left foot and then stomp your right foot. You want to also play that quite lightly. We call that feathering. The bass drum is often used in jazzy almost feel the base and not hear it. So if you play that Beecher, nice and soft against the bass drum, it just adds a bit of depth, but it's not too overpowering. What I usually do is let's see, that's the drum head and this is the beater. When I play the bass drum, I bury it like that and leave it there. But when I'm playing jazz, I hit the bass drum and then let it come back. So the drum head can vibrate a bit more and just create a bit more low end and just a bit more body. Here's that basic skeleton beat with the foreign for bass drum. Now what we could do is add a 24 on the snare. Another variation you can do, instead of playing the snare drum on the two and the four, It's just play a site stick on the floor. And that is your basics of the swing group. I absolutely love playing, swinging, so I'm quite excited that you guys are gonna be playing it as well. Now when you're practicing this, just remember that the style of the music is quite dynamic and quite soft a lot of the time. So be sure to practice that are low, low volume as well as a high-volume and just mess around with your dynamics. There you go. That's the basics of the swing. Slap on some jazz records and just get jamming. 57. Triplet Fills: Alright, we've learned how to use triplets in groups. We've got our shuffle group and we've got our swing groove. Now let's learn how we can apply triplets to some drum fills. I've got a bunch of great sounding fills for you guys. So let's just get into the lesson. I'm going to talk about a few different ideas that you can employ while using triplets. We can start off by talking about how we can just use single stroke roles in our triplets. We can start off with a simple eighth note triplet, and we can add some accents in there. Or we can take that same eighth note triplet and just start to move around the kit. Of course, you can also use semiquaver sex tuplets and please single stroke rules that way. Another thing you can do is put your triplets, your single struggles against two different surfaces on the kit. In this example, we're going between the right-hand and the ride cymbal, left-hand of the hi-hat. And then on the two and the four will play out left hand back down on the snare drum for the backbeat. And they're played his eighth note triplets. When you're playing blues music and you want to have a big buildup. This fill is fantastic. It's just eighth note triplets played on the floor, tom and the snare drum at the same time. Let me just add a four on the floor bass drum as well. You can add a bit of dynamics and build it up as you get to the end of the film as well. Now you don't have to play triplets just on the hands. You can split them between the hands and the feet. In this example, we're doing just that, but we're also adding flaps. These can be left or right hand lambs, just whatever is more comfortable for you. The next example is another way we can split the hands between the triplets. In this case, we're doing alternating strokes between their right hand and the right foot. Another favorite of mine is playing quarter note triplets as a drum fill. The quarter note triplet and a fill just gives you that cascading side where you just kinda slow everything down and it's like a drum kit falling down some stairs. This first example is just the two beats long and we just do slams. Second example of a quarter note triplet, NFL involves the toolbar of quarter note triplets. That means we play that triplet theories of free twice to get the full bar. Another favorite sticking of mine when playing triplets is right, left, left, right, left, left, right, left, right, left, left, or the other way round where it's left, right, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, right. Here's how we can use those hand patterns. And that's all the fields have gotten. You in this lesson, has quite a few. So hopefully that gets you started and really just take it from there. Try these different sticking out with the right, left, left or left rate rate. Or try different subdivisions of the triplets at the quarter note triplet and then the eighth note and 16th note triplets. Try splitting these triplets up between the hands and the feet and just mess around with orchestration and where you play these triplets on the kit. You can of course, just play eighth note triplets and the snare, and just add different accents as well. Obviously, there's loads of things you can do, but hopefully these films will give you a basis knowledge and then you can take it from there. 58. Triplet and Straight Transitions - pt1: Now we've got a solid grasp of triplets. It's now time to integrate them back into our other note values. We've got two categories of notes, really, we've got our street notes, which is all the stuff we did before this chapter. So quarter notes, eighth notes, 16th notes and stuff. And we've also got our tuplets, which in this case we're talking about the triplets. We're going to combine these two categories of note values to come up with some much more complicated and interesting sending rhythms. Now that's gonna be a challenge at first. So what we're gonna do the star this lesson is just go for a free different exercises that are going to get you used to transitioning from triplets to straight and then vice versa. The note pyramid is just where we go up and down in different values and we can do that as much as we want. And it's always played as alternating strokes. And just for simplicity, we're just going to play on the snare drum. We can start off with a bar of quarter notes. Let me go to a bar of coordinate triplets than eighth notes, and then eighth note triplets. Then we go to 16th notes, and then finally 16th note triplets or sex tuplets. And then we do the same thing in the reverse order. And that is our full naught pyramid. These are all the main note values you're probably going to use in your drumming journey, at least at the start. And so it's really important that you learn all these different ones and how they interact with each other. And then work triangle is a great way to do this. Let's move on to some different exercises. We're going to start off by just moving between different subdivisions. For that first example, what you could do instead of playing alternating strokes is just play it all on one hand. In this case, in this example, I'm going to play on the right hand. And that's going to strengthen your hands and build the control. You need to play these rhythms with a groove. Anyway, here's the rest of the exercises. Next what we're gonna do is we're going to apply these triplets and straight notes. I'm not going to make some grooves out of them. 59. Triplet and Straight Transitions - pt2: Playing these ethnic groups and then adding triplets and is a very common thing in like hip hop and rap music and dance music as well. Especially in like trap music and stuff where you've got the sprinkler hi-hats that are just they sound like they're just machine guns is all just changing subdivisions. So going from street triplets and then vice versa. Here's an example of a trap beat. Finally, what we can do is just play some normal eighth note rock groups and then do some triplets as our drum fill. Of course, the group doesn't have to be strictly eighth notes and in the field has to be strictly triplets. You can mix and match. And of course what you can do is you can use the filters from the last lesson, and you can use them within an eighth note groove context. Having that knowledge of rhythms and having the ability to go between different subdivisions and different naught values is really going to set you apart as a drummer, the key is just training your ears to recognize all these different rhythms and different note values. And if you can hear it, you can play it. Anyway, that's a lot of information. There's a lot of exercises. I think there's like 20 or 21 in this. So it's a lot for the one lesson. But this stuff is going to really help you as a drummer. But bear in mind, this is gonna be quite hard to begin with because you're essentially taking two things that are usually separate and you're putting them together and mash them all. And it's gonna be quite hard to get them to fit. Sometimes. It's a really nailing that note triangle firstly and then go through the exercises and then start to apply it into your playing. I recommend checking it. Someone like benny grabbed who does this stuff all the time. It's really awesome. Anyway. I'll see you in the next lesson. Take care. 60. Bonham Triplets: Right now we're thinking that intro is we intense? It's way too much. And you're probably thinking, why is that? And the beginners course, are we actually going to learn that? And the answer is yes. Why was playing in the intro was just jumbled. I'm triplets and it's what we're gonna be learning today. You're quickly going to learn that that isn't actually too hard to play. And really it's all about just learning some simple patterns. Who is John bottom? Well, John bottom is a massive inspiration to me and it's been a huge influence in my playing. He was the drummer of Led Zeppelin and he was known for those crazy triplets on the toms. In this lesson, we're going to break it all down and I'm going to show you that it's really not too hard. The bottom triplets are made of three nodes. These three notes are grouped as triplets and it's just looked at a few different variations of the sticking. In this lesson, I'm going to blast through a few different examples of how we can apply these trombone and triplets. Now in these initial examples and playing them as eighth note triplets just to keep it nice and cool and nice and slow for now. What we're gonna be doing in these exercises is going through some of the different variations of the triplets. The John bottom triplet usually involves one bass drum know, and two-hand nodes. And this is where the variation comes in. You can have a bass drum first and then the two triplets on the hands. Or you can have the two triplets on the hands first and then end on a bass drum. And then you could also do the different combinations of hands. You can go right, left, or left, right. John bottom actually lead with his left hand. So he would always go left, right foot, left, right foot, or left, right, left, right. You'll find that a lot more challenging because the left hand is usually not leading things. Anyway, let's get into all the examples. The left hand is usually up in the first term and the right hand is usually on the floor tone, but there's gonna be some different variations in there as well. Those exercises will really help you capture the essence of that john Borland triplets. You can use it for drum fills, you can use them for solos. You can do whatever you want with them. Those were played as eighth note triplets, but what you could do it is you can actually double the speed by making them 16th note triplets. Now we've looked at the John Bonham triplets. I want to look at another fill that he does. That is awesome. I call it the bucket of fish Fill. Now I call it the bucket of fish fill because the actual rhythm that you're playing sounds like bucket the fish bucket, the fish bucket to fish. What we're playing is three 16th note triplets and then an eighth note. We can count it like this. One triplet and two triplet and 34. And we've already seen that rhythm, but what we're gonna do is change the orchestration of that rhythm. What we're going to play is we're going to have a right-hand or the snare drum. Then left hand on the first time than right hand on the floor tom. And then we're going to finish off with a bass drum. Alright guys, here's a top tip for when you're playing that book, the fish drum fill, as we know it goes snare, tom, Tom, bass drum on when you're playing that quite fast, it can be hard to move your right hand from the snare drum to the four tome and type. Instead of moving your entire arm from the snare drum to the floor tom, way you could do is you could just rotate your wrist like this. It's very similar to the thing we did in the third chapter where we're moving our left hand up to the hi-hat to skim it apart from we're doing it on the right hand. But the fourth job, because there's less movement, we can move between the drums much quicker. So notice that my arm is not really moving to the fourth term. It's not like this. That's a lot harder to do than just moving your wrist. If you are struggling to get that filter, fast tempo, that movement there might be the thing that does it. Now you hear that field quite a lot in rock music and stuff because it's just a big power fulfill. It's a great film if you want to have a fill before the music stops, it just kinda pulls a hand brake on the drums. So try that at the end of a song or the end of a section of a song, or what you could do in this example, I've got it implemented into a groove. The final thing I want to talk about is that you don't have to use these hand patterns and feet patterns from the John bottom triplets. Just as a drum fill, you can take those sticking such as right, left, right, left foot, or foot, left foot, right, left. And you can apply them into groups. Here's a couple of examples of that. That's one of my favorite little flourishes like to do in groups to make it a little bit spicier. Foot, left foot, right, left on the hi-hat just adds a bit of something. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Have fun with those different Jon Bon and patterns, and have fun with the bucket of fish, Fill and experiment and try it out in some grooves are fills or try solo with just that Jon Bon and pattern. And just change where you're playing out in the drum kit. Don't forget, you can also change the dynamics. See you in the next lesson. 61. 12/8 VS 4/4 Triplets: Alright guys, I just want to do a quick lesson on the differences between 1284 for eighth note triplets. The reason I want to do this video is because it can be hard to differentiate between 1284 for triplets, there are subtle differences, but it's usually only on paper that you actually see these differences. What makes it harder is 44128 can be interchangeable. In this lesson, I'm going to break down the differences. Firstly, as we know, 12 is just 12th eighth notes in a bar. These eighth notes are usually phrased as three. If we compare that to a bar of 44 with eighth note triplets, we've got four beats in the bar, but we've actually got 12 notes as well, and they're written notes, eighth note triplets. So there's already similarities there. You've got your 128, which is four groups of 3 eighth notes. Then you've got 44, which is four groups of three triplet eighth nodes. So there's the same amount of notes in the bar. Let's compare two beats are played the same way, 112 and then 14 for the eighth note triplets. As you heard in the 12th eight example, the metronome is counting every eighth note. And that's because you're counting every eighth note in the 12th week because that's the pulse. You're going 12322332423 or 123456789101112. If we compare that to the 44, we're just counting quarter notes and then the triplets I kinda filling in the gaps. That's because we're just counting for four, which is just 1234. That's one of the main differences if you're hearing it and counting it. But the main difference is often come from field and also the written music. Never imagine you had a song that is all in triplets, even though it's a five-minute song. And the entire time you're playing triplets on the hi-hat, that might look really messy on the sheet music. So it might be easier to write it in 128. If you write it as 128, there's less going on in the sheet music and it's a lot easier to read. That's one of the main reasons you might want to use 128 because if it's in 44 and it's triplets everywhere, it just might look like a nightmare to actually read it. Another reason you might want to use 12 is for fuel. So a lot of blues music uses 128. The reason used 12 is because it's got that constant H-naught feel to it. And it just sounds quite nice because you are counting 128 as the constant eighth notes like 123456789101112. But if we compare that to for four, we're just counting the quarter notes, 123. It's got different fields. So 12844 are interchangeable, but the main reasons you might want to use 128 over 44 is a feeling things. So you might want to have a eighth note pulse going the whole time, and that may be easier to write with 128. Whereas you might want to use for, for to keep things nice and compact and just four beats in the bar and just do them as triplets, especially when you're not using triplets the entire song. You'll find that a lot of blues music uses 12. Hope that's not too confusing, but I just wanted to kind of outlined the basics of the differences between 44 eighth note triplets and 128. They've got the same amount and notes they sound the same, but they're written differently and they've got a different feel to them. But you'll find both end-use, so get familiar with both of them. 62. Rhythm Exam 3: Hello and welcome to the final rhythm exam of the course. Feels like it was only yesterday when we first started doing our rhythm exams. Back in the second chapter, we're now in chapter five and our knowledge has come so far. We know all about rudiments, we know about triplets, you know, about different subdivisions. We know so much about drumming. And this little snare drum piece hopefully encapsulates all of that. As usual, the rhythm exam is nothing too fancy or scary. It's just a simple snare drum piece that you can do. And if there's anything that's troubling you, you can go back to the different parts of the course and revise it. Hopefully there's nothing that trips you up too bad. And what we'll do now is I'll just play this note on peace through so you can hear how it sounds. If you could read that music and you can understand what's going on, then fantastic. You've got a solid knowledge of rhythm and that's gonna get you very far in your drumming journey. As usual, just download that sheet music and get learning. You don't have to learn it by sight reading it and being able to sight read it. Just learn the piece. Just enjoy the process of learning it. And if there is things that are tripping you up, just go back and revise them. And that concludes Chapter five. In the next chapter, we're going to be looking at different genres such as rock, jazz, funk, and loads of other things. We're going to be looking at the stylistic properties of this music and how you can make it sound good on the drums. 63. Drum styles - Rock: Alright guys, here's a good. In this lesson, we're gonna be breaking down some of the main characteristics of rock drumming. I'm also going to show you some of my favorite rock groups. When I was growing up, I was raised on like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, or the classics. And then as I got older, I looked into more like pop punk stuff like blink when it too, green day, all that stuff because of that rock music really remains one of my favorite genres to play. I think when you're playing rock music on the drums is a few things that you can do to make yourself sound more authentic. Firstly, we can talk about our role as a drummer in a rock band. If you listen to a lot of rock music, you know, the drums are really the driving force behind the band. The drummer is the one keeping our altogether and keeping the song moving forward. And that is our number one priority as a rock drummer playing a solid group that just keeps the song driving forward. Now that driving drunk group doesn't have to be super loud or like super complicated. It just has to really make the song feel good. In rock music and rock drumming, you'll usually find that the snare drum lands on the two and the four. That's of course a familiar concept, the backbeat. But you'll find in rock music that, that two in the four snare drum is pretty much constant throughout the song. In rock drumming, you'll find that dynamics aren't as extreme. And other genres such as jazz, you're probably going to be playing fairly load because you've got to compete with the guitar amps and all the base and the singer. So you want to have a nice loud drum set. That doesn't mean you've got a whack the drums as hard as you can do. Sometimes if you hit the drum too hard or you hit this symbol too hard, actually chokes the symbol and drum and it actually sounds weaker. It's all about finding the sweet spot where the drum sound good and you're feeling that you're energized, but you're also not choking the symbols or breaking symbols. But really rock drumming when it comes down to it just being a solid player that's playing in time and just driving the groove and just making it sound powerful and big and exciting. The group doesn't have to be complicated, but doesn't have to be boring either. The main thing you wanna do is make sure that you're playing consistently. And also you're playing something that makes the band sound good as a whole. You're playing in a band. You want to make sure that you don't just say and good, but you want to make sure that everyone else Sounds good as well. Anyway, I'm going to shut up and let you hear some of my favorite rock drumming groups. Hopefully that gives you an idea of rock drumming. Make it powerful and make it groove, but also make it solid as a drum groove and make sure that you're playing musically. I guess. If you want to get into rock drumming, the best place to start is by listening to rock music. Here's a few of my favorite rock drummers. You've got Dave grow from the Foo Fighters or Nirvana. You've got new period from Russia is a fantastic solar player. Should check out his drum solos. You've of course got John Bonham from Led Zeppelin. You've got Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is one of my top five drummers ever. I just love them so much. You've got in paste from deep purple, who is a fantastic player and really plays a lot of cool fills in his music. And finally, one of my biggest influences was Travis Barker from Blink 1A2. He writes really awesome parts for songs and they're very unique sounding. Hopefully that gives you an overall idea of what rock drumming is. Obviously these points don't apply to every single rock song ever. They should give you a nice starting point. Next, we're gonna be looking at funk drumming. 64. Drum styles - Funk: Alright, let's talk about funk music in a nutshell for drummers, funky music is so much fun. Funky music is so much fun for drummers because the silent music really brings to the drums to the forefront of the sound, the rhythm section in a funk bands. So the bass, guitar, and drums are going to either make or break a funk band. The rhythm section is so integral to that funk sound. And because of that, the drums get to have a lot of fun. Let's talk about some of the characteristics of funk drumming. Then. Funk drumming is primarily based in beats and grooves. So we're using a lot of hi-hat kick and snare or ride cymbal kick and snare. And what you'll find in funk music is that you've got a bar or two of groove and that pretty much lips for the entire song. There will be some fills in there, but usually you're going to stick into that groove. And that's my drums are so integral to funk music is because, you know, they're playing the entire time and they usually play in something that's looped. If you compare funk music to rock music and the drumming involved in both styles, you find that there are some similarities in both styles. The drums are leading the song and they're both fairly consistent. But there are fairly permanent differences between funk and rock. For example, in funk, the backbeat doesn't always come down on the two and the four. There might be some differences there. And also the bass drum doesn't always come down on the one three. You'll find that there's a lot more syncopation going on. So there's a lot more offbeats and it's a bit busier sometimes. But you'll also find is that there's a lot more dynamics in funk drumming. There's a lot more ghost notes. There's a lot more level open hi-hats and things like that and embellishments. Now obviously rock drumming has that as well. But I think in funk music, because the style of the music is different, it's more prominent sounding a tell-tale sign of some funk drumming is offbeat kick drums and offbeat snare drums, go snot and open hi-hats. And it's group-based. If you listen to any James Brown or like Curtis Mayfield, you'll find that the drummers are very involved in the music. There's a lot going on, but you will also find the drums are fairly consistent in what they play. So if you learn that one or two bars of group, you can pretty much play the whole song, as well as being group-based and syncopated. What you'll also find in the drums and funk music is that they really religiously follow the bass guitar. And that comes back to the point that was making that the rhythm section has to be tight in a funk band. Otherwise it just won't work. If you listen to the song grief me by King Floyd, you'll hear that the bass drum is really following that bass guitar rhythm. And because of that, it just locks in. The groove is really tight. Of course, funk drumming doesn't always have to be super busy with gallstones everywhere and lots of things going on in syncopation. It can be a simple four and the four straight groove. And a lot of the time that might be more effective. It really just depends on the energy of the song and what can ascend you're going for as an overall band. Now we can't talk about funk drumming without mentioning more tone. Now more time was a record company and it really shaped a lot of the soul, funk era and disco era of music. Maintain records had a signature sound because they had a house band called the Funk Brothers. One of my favorite pieces from the modern era. I'm not actually sure what the beat is called. I just call it the more time. They basically involves straight eighth notes on the hi-hat. The snare drum goes on the 1234. And then we've also got four on the floor, kick drum. So you're playing four on the floor with your snare drum on your bass drum at the same time, Chris, a cool effect. You'll find it in funk drumming is that a lot of the recordings are not quantize to a metronome and then not like totally on the grid. You'll find that there's a lot of human elements in the drumming. The group might be shuffled, so it might be a bit more loose or it might be ahead of the beat. So it creates a bit of a rushed sound or behind the beat, which creates another lazy loose feeling. The key again is just to listen to some funk music. Here's a few recommendations of some of my favorite funk drummers. The first guy is Bernard Porter, who is our session player. So he recorded loads and loads of hundreds, I think, of more tone and funk records. So check him out and check his playing. You've got Ziggy Middle East who is the drama of the meters, who again is a fantastic pioneer of funk drumming. You've got quite stable field who is famous for playing with James Brown. And you've got Steve Jordan, who is our modern session player, who is known for his killer field. So I really recommend you go out and listen to some James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, a lot of different Motown tunes and funk tunes. And just get a feel for the music. Just have a listen to the drummer and see if they're playing a bit looser, bit more shuffled. See what they're doing with the bass guitar, see how they're working together and just listen to the music and see how it all works. Here's a few more examples of some of my favorite funky groups. 65. Drum styles - 6/8 Ballad: All right guys, welcome back. In this lesson we're going to be looking at the 16th ballad style of music, as the name might suggest that this music is in the 68 times signature. A bound is usually identified by about, is usually identified by its slower tempo. And also about is a song that kinda tells a story. Usually I love story. The sixth time signature really works for the ballad, especially at slower tempos, because it's got that back-and-forth motion to it. You know where it's just like 123456123456. In general, the drums invalid songs are not really at the forefront of the music though there to keep time and really just accompany the singer. Because of that, the drums in the songs usually aren't too busy or complicated. They're just there to keep time. And usually the beat stays fairly consistent throughout the song with little embellishments and fields such as an open hi-hat or just little fills before I section change of the soul. In terms of dynamics, balance are usually quite soft, but they can ramp up in volume towards the end. So just use your ears and just listened to the other musicians or the backing track and see what's going on and just change your playing to suit that. If it's very quiet, you might want to use the cross stick instead of the full snare drum sound. Here's a few examples of some 68 bowed grooves. You might find that the 68 group is slightly shuffled or swung. And that means that if you're playing 16th notes normally in 6812345, $0.06. But if they're shuffled is more like 1234561. So it's got a more shuffle E field to it. Here's a couple of examples of some swung 68 groups. They're just a bit looser feeling when you listen to it in the context of the music, you can totally hear how it works. Now the key to play nice slow ballot tunes is actually learning how to play slow. A lot of time playing slow is actually harder than playing fast. The key is just to keep breathing and stay relaxed and have a good internal time. But also listen to other parts in the music that might give you a hint to different parts and keep you in time. There's no shame in using other instruments to keep you in time as well. Now just for fun, let's look at some films that you can use to play along with these 68 groups. Hopefully that gets you play in a bit more because it is used fairly commonly just like for four. So it's good to get used to both of these time signatures. Just take it slow, follow the sheet music and just use your ears. And again, the more you listen to music, and the more you play this music, the more you'll be used to it, especially when it comes to different time signatures. So the more you listened to and actually play it in 68, the better you're gonna be at it. So have some fun with that and be sure not to cry your eyes that when you're playing all these love songs. But yes, that's pretty much what a Ballard is. So enjoy. 66. Drum styles - Shuffle: In this video, I want to showcase some of my favorite shuffle groups. The shuffle rhythm is based in triplets and it goes like this. As we know, one triplet, triplet, 3412341. The shuffle groove is used in all sorts of different styles of music, but it's primarily used in blues music and country music as well. And what we can do today is look at the different shuffles used in different styles of music. There's no specific shuffle for different styles is just these are used in certain contexts and they work really well. In my opinion, there's two main categories of shuffles. You've got your normal time, then you've got your halftime. The normal time shuffles are the ones that have the backbeat on the two and the four of every bar. And then the halftime shuffles have the snare on the three of the bar, which gives it a more loose, kinda slow or feeling without actually changing the pulse. Let's look at some of the normal time shuffles. That specific shuffle groove there with the left-hand doing shuffles the entire time. And then the right hand doing our rights swing pattern, That's what we call the Texas Shuffle. It's used a lot in country music and it's very effective by A's quite challenging. You are going to tackle it. I recommend starting off with the group that was in the previous example, where you've got both hands doing the shuffle pattern and then eventually take away one on this notes on the right hand. And then you'll end up with the swing pattern on the right hand and then the shuffle still going on the left hand. Now let's look at some halftime shuffle groups. These are so much fun to play. Some of the most famous drunk is we're actually halftime shuffles. You've got filled in the rain by Led Zeppelin. You've got Rosanna by total. And then you've got the famous produce shuffle, which is played by Bernard per day. We mentioned him in the funk lesson. If you learn all these different shuffle grooves, then you have a great repertoire to pick and choose from. Depending on the musical scenario, there's no right or wrong answer when it comes to shuffles, just play around with these different shuffles and find one that suits the music the best. And just for fun, here's a few different fillers you can use when you're shuffling away. If you want to check it more music with shovels, and I recommend you check out these drummers. We've got our Jackson Junior, we've got Jeff pour Karo. We've got John Bonham, and we've got Sam Lee. Alright, hopefully that gives you a lot to work on. These triplets are a lot of fun to play, but they can be quite challenging. My tip to actually learn these is just count every triplet, even the ones that aren't actually playing, just count them out loud or in your head. And you'll see how everything comes together a lot easier. And of course, my favorite method to learning anything on the drums is splitting out the limbs. So starting with the right hand, then adding in the left hand, then adding in the right foot. And then finally, I didn't left foot has some fun with that and enjoy. 67. Drum styles - Country: Alright, in this lesson we're gonna be looking at country music. Love it or hate it. Country music is a very popular style of music and you're probably going to be playing it at some point in your musical journey. Now, Country music is such a broad style of music is hard to kneel in a specific style of drumming for it. What we're gonna do in this lesson is look at a couple of the main countries styles. And we're going to look at the drums that go with them. Firstly, going to look at some modern country, so like country rock and country pop. Then we'll look at some more old school style of country as well. Now, a modern country you will find is very, very similar to rock music. It's a lot of the same instrumentation as rock music displayed slightly differently. It's not as heavy sending, there's a lot more clean tones and the guitar and the vocals are a lot more clean. The drumming is very rocky. The role of the drummer in this situation is very similar to rock music. Your main goals are to keep solid time, keep a nice backbeat going, and just keep everything moving on forward. You really are the backbone of the band and you've really got to keep things tight. A lot of modern country music involves putting a solid beat and just adding different fields depending on the situation. A common thing that happens in modern country music is stops. This is where the whole band stops, or a bar or a beat or two beats or whatever. And the vocalist does a little line and then you're back in with something else like it could be before a chorus. Could be at the start of averse, could be the intro, whatever. Be sure to listen to some music and get used to those stops because they happen quite regularly. But yeah, modern country is very similar to rock music, so it's a lot of fun to play, but it's just slightly different in terms of the actual music being played. But just like rock music, the drummers role is to keep everyone together and keep a solid group going. Here's a few examples of some modern country groups. Now classic country is a bit more chilled out a lot of the time. Dynamically, you're probably going to be playing a little bit softer. A lot of the old school countries stuff is actually using acoustic guitars instead of electric amplified guitars. So you're going to have to change your dynamics to suit that and not overpower the other instruments. Overall, you're gonna be putting a lot of shuffle grooves and lot of bluesy groups. So really get used to playing shuffles. But as well as playing normal grooves and shuffle grooves, There's also a special beat called the train beat that is very unique to country music. It's called the train beat because what you play on the drum kit is very similar to a steam train. Chugging along. The pattern itself isn't too complicated. You're just playing 16th notes on the snare drum, you playing a 44 and the bass drum. And then your left foot is just in offbeats. And to make the train be a bit more interesting here, add some accents to the snare drum. The most common one is doing the accent on the offbeats alongside the left foot. Now you can play the 16th notes on the snare drum purely straight like one knee and R2 and R3 and R4. Under a lot of times with these train beats are slightly swollen. They're not completely swan, but they're also just a bit looser than just playing totally straight 16th notes. If you listen to the songs that these tree and groups are from, you'll get what I mean. Here's some simple variations of the trained group. Alright, that's the basics of country music. So the modern stuff is very rocky sounding. You're very consistent with your drumming. You're playing a solid back the other time. And compare that to the old stuff, which is a bit more dynamic, bit more loose feeling. Be sure to check out some country music. A great starts to check out the country Spotify purse that I've got for you guys. Just put the playlist on shuffle and have some fun with it. The final style of music we're going to be looking at as jazz music. 68. Drum styles - Jazz pt1: Alright, let's talk about jazz music. Now. I'm not going to attempt to cover the entirety of the style of jazz music in one lesson, it would take an entire course to do that. What we're gonna do in this lesson, let's look at some tips and tricks and exercises that are going to help you start your jazz journey. Now, jazz music is a little bit different from the other styles because it goes back even further than any of the other styles that we've talked about so far. It has such a vibrant history and it's impossible to cover in one lesson, what makes jazz unique is a lot of the performances are improvised, so they're totally made up on the spot as you go. And that is sometimes what puts people off. Jazz music is the fact you've got to make everything up as you go. But there's also what makes it so much more fun because you have a lot more freedom to do what you want. That's obviously not always the case. You might get some big band music that has to be exactly played as it is. But a lot of the time is can I improvised? Right? Let's look at some jazz drumming then. The basis for a lot of jazz drumming is the swing groove recovered that a while ago. But here's a refresher of hope that sounds. Let's compare jazz drumming to rock music. In rock music, the bass drum and the snare drum are really leading the rest of the kit. But in jazz music is the ride cymbal is the right symbol on the left foot high hat that goes on the two and the four. And you can get by, by playing just that in a jazz song. The bass drum and the snare drum are used to improvise around this basic pattern, this improvisation on the bass drum and the snare drum is called comping company is the part that gets people really scared. When you listen to jazz drummers, that seems like they're just playing anything at any point and it's just all madness. But there is some method in the madness. A lot of the time jazz drummers are playing comping patterns that match up with other parts of the band. There might be patterns on the piano that are played on the snare drum to mimic. Or there might be stuff that's put on the bass drum that's accompanying the double bass. The way to think of it comping and jazz drumming is to think about the drum kit as a melodic instrument. Thinking about different melodies in a song and just play along with that with your left hand and your right foot. That might be stuff that's in the song or maybe stuff that's not in the song. And it still sounds cool. Now this is worth listening. Comes in. Listening to music is really going to help you come up with different comping patterns. If you have listened to more jazz drumming and jazz tunes and different melodies, you find that company has a lot more easier. You'll find certain patterns that work really well with your playing and you'll be able to use them quite freely. And that in a very, very basic nutshell is what jazz drumming is. Jumping and playing different melodies on the drum kit that match up with different parts of the song. And then you've got that swing pattern going in the right symbol and the left foot high hat. The right symbols there as your timekeeper and the bass drum and snare drum and there as your space. Now before we get into these exercises, I wanted to talk about Springfield. Springfield is essentially how we play the right symbol. There's three main swing fields. You've got your loose one, you've got your normal one, and you've got your kind of bouncy rushed one. The normal field is where we played the triplets bang on just as the R. So it's like one triplet, triplet, triplet, triplet one. And it's very much on the grid. If we go to the rushed swing fuel, will find that the two consecutive notes are played closer together and they create much more bouncy feel. On the other side of the spectrum, we've got our looser feel where it's a bit more relaxed and it's not a swing is a bit more laid back. Now there's no right or wrong answer had to play that. But it's just different ways that you can actually play the swing and get different vapes. If you're playing a slow, sloppy jazz tune, maybe you want to just lay back and display that slower sloppier version of the swing. If you want just a normal swing groove, you can just play that normal version. And then if you're playing stuff that's a bit more bouncy and a bit more up tempo. You can play that super rushed version. Here's an example of all free versions plate. Now you know about swing feels I want to move on to some exercises are going to help you build the coordination to play jazz comping. Now I'm going to say off the bat, this stuff is advanced. This is the kind of stuff that I still practiced to this day. I still struggle with it. So I thought I didn't put it in the course because jazz drumming is not easy, but this is a great way to start it. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put a swing group for the ride cymbal and the left foot high hat. And we're going to add a foreign, the floor bass drum That's feathering the bass drum just playing lately. And that stays consistent for all these exercises. I'm, what we're gonna do is we're going to change the placement of the left hand in the beats. We're going to start off with the first exercise, which is the left-hand playing every beat of the bar. What we then do is remove that left hand one triplet across. So now it's on the one triplet, triplet, triplet, triplet or 1234. And so we've moved it over by 1 eighth note triplet. And then finally for the third exercise, we move that over once again. So now the snare drum lands on the third triplet of every beat. So now it's like one triplet, triplet, triplet, triplet 1234. While you're doing that, the swing pattern stays the same. So what we're actually doing is snare drum permutations within a swing groove. We're playing every possible snare drum note within the beat. Once you're happy with those three exercises, you should try play them one after the other. 69. Drum styles - Jazz pt2: The next three examples are the same thing, but we're playing to snare drum notes in a row. So we've got the first one, which is 1234. And then all we do is move those to snare drum notes over. So it's 1234. Then we move these two nodes over again and we actually get a shuffle groove, which is 12341. Once you've got those three examples by themselves, play them consecutively. Now that's gonna be pretty tough, but these examples are going to build that independence and coordination in that left hand is going to allow you to play the melody is in your head. If you want to get into jazz comping, then definitely go through all these different permutations over and over again until you don't have to think about it. And then you'll have the ability to play these phrases in different ways around the kit. Of course, if you want to work on your bass drum independence, you can do these exercises with the bass drum instead of the snare drum. Alright, that is really hard, but I wanted to make this course future-proof. So you can come back when you're a bit more advanced and still gets something out of the course to finish off, Here's some drum fills that you can use in your swing groups. Alright, and that there is some stuff you can do to build up your jazz chops. The key again is just listen, listen, listen to as much jazz music as you can. Of course, I've got my Spotify playlist. If you want to listen to some specific jazz drummers, I recommend Elvin Jones, Buddy Rich, Tony Williams, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Joe Morello, Philly, Joe Jones. There's so many. I'm going to leave it there because that's a lot of stuff to process. Just bear in mind, jazz drumming is very hard. It took me about six or seven years of drumming before it had the courage to even step up the jazz. So don't be afraid to come back to it later on. I just wanted to include something in this course about jazz. Anyway, I'm going to leave it there. Hopefully that's not too much information. Have some fun with that. Enjoy the process of learning and take it slow. Just be patient with yourself, don't get mad. It takes a long time to get used to this stuff. It's a totally different style of music that you're probably not used to. So just don't beat yourself up. 70. Dotted Notes - pt1: Hello and welcome to the further notation chapter. In this chapter we'll look at some more concepts of notation and see how they can be applied. Today we're looking at dotted notes. Dotted notes are fairly common thing to see in sheet music, and you will have to get familiar with them. Luckily, dotted notes aren't too complicated. Whenever you see a dot after a note, this means that the noise to be played for an extra 50 per cent of the original duration. So the value of a dotted note is 1.5 of the normal notes. Think of the dot as an extension. If we had a normal quarter note that lasts one beat, if we had a dotted quarter note that would last 1.5 beats. If we had a half-note that normally last two beats and then dotted it, it would last three beats instead because it's 1.5 times the original value. A good way to think about dog notes is to half the value of the dotted note, then you count three of that value. So if we look at a dotted quarter note, we can have that value. So becomes an eighth note and we times that by three. And that means a dotted quarter note is the duration free eighth notes. That also means a dotted half note is the duration of three quarter notes. And then a dotted eighth note is the duration of three 16th notes. Hopefully you can see a trend there. It's all just maps. Who will, yay, yay, I love maths. The two dotted notes, you're most likely to see our dotted quarter an eighth notes. You'll often see them written out joined up with another note. For example, a dotted eighth note and a 16th note. Don't be scared if you see those rhythms. Just break it down note by note. Let's look at this example here. We've got a dotted eighth note and then a 16th note. When working out rhythms is best to use the smallest naught value in the rhythm. So let's use 16th those. As we know, a dotted eighth note can also be treated as three 16th notes. So we can count that first node as one. And then we finish off with a single 16th note as the art of the beat. What we end up with is a rhythm that plays on the first and last 16th note of each beat. Let's play it. Let's look at another example, a dotted quarter note, followed by an eighth note, using our rule of having the original value of the dot and then put in three together, we end up with a value of 3 eighth notes for the DOD coordinate. That means our first dotted quarter note last for the duration of the 12 of the bar. Then we finish that off with the eighth note, which is the end of the two. So the duration of the two nodes lasts for two beats. Again, Let's play that rhythm. Remember to count aloud. Now we have put these rhythms before. So why did we need dotted notes? This again comes down to making things clear on the sheet music and using the least amount of notation possible, let's compare the first example of the dotted eighth note, the 16th note, with the same rhythm without the dotted note. If you are sight reading or having to learn things fast, the version with all the risks might be a bit harder to read than the version with adults. Here's the comparison using the dotted quarter note than the eighth note. It just comes down to a matter of how clean you want your music to look and what you think works for the sheet music. It just gives you options really. There may be times where it makes more sense to write with all the dots. It's good practice to be prepared for both though. Here's a couple of groups that use dotted notes. Dotted notes have another very important role. Remember compound time signatures. These are the time signatures that are based in phrases of three, such as 68 or 12 feet. Dotted notes are used a lot in these time signatures as they fit very nicely into them. For example, a bar of six, it can be summed up into just two dotted quarter notes. That's because each dotted quarter note represents 3 eighth notes. So we just have to add two of them together to get the same value as 6 eighth notes, which is a biophysics ate. The same thing applies for 12 feet, Toby. It can be summed up into four dotted quarter notes. Again, the same principle applies there, very handy for cleaning up component times signatures. Here's a few examples of how dotted notes can be used in compound time signatures. Now, everything I've talked about with dotted notes applies to rests to it's entirely possible to have dotted rests the actin the exact same way as dotted notes. Apart from you don't play anything, don't address are commonly found in compounds. Time signatures. Here's a couple of examples of how you can use it. Now as your crash course in dotted notes, if you ever come across them, just simply break them down, current them alone and don't be intimidated by them. The more you practice with them, the more you'll eventually get used to how the different rhythm combination sound and you won't have to think about it. You will find a worksheet of dotted notes for you to work through in the lesson resources. Here's how those exercises. 72. Ties: We've almost reached the end of the music theory. So hold on tight while we tackled the subject of ties. So what are ties in music? Ties are little curved lines that connect notes together. What do they do? Tide notes, sure that they are to be played as one continuous note with the combined value of the two nodes, what you're doing is you're simply adding these nodes together into one value. Of course, as drugs don't have a duration, we simply just play the first note and then we don't play any of the other notes that are tight. Let's look at this example here. We have eighth notes that are tied because these are tied to those sign that quarter notes. Hi, simply combines the nodes together. So these two bars actually send the same when they're played out on the drums. As well as tying the same note values together. You can also tie different null values together too. Here's a couple of examples of the type notes and they're non tight counterparts. You can also try more than two notes together. Here's a few examples of that. Now you're probably thinking, why do we need ties? We have normal null values and dotted notes already and, uh, yeah, I get that frustration. Tiny dots are commonly used when combining notes over bar lines. This is the most frequent way of using them. When they are used this way, it can sometimes save a lot of nasty notation and clean things up. It seems pointless. Wooden drums don't have a note length like a piano. So what's the point? Firstly, ties can be used to show the drama of what the other musicians are doing. Sometimes ties fit the rest of the music better and help give you at the larger picture of things rather than just rhythms on the page. You'll often see ties on sheet music for big band jazz songs. The ties usually match up to the phrases of the horn sections and can help you when they're improvising. Also, ties can be useful for your symbols that do have a sustain. You might need to play a cymbal swell for several bars and a tie could help notate that, perhaps along with some text. So if you ever see tied nodes, just think of them as one long note. They are more versatile for instruments with sustained, but they can have their uses for drums. It's good to get used to them and to help you if middle it will work. Quick quiz, check the lesson downloads for that. 73. Repeats and Structural Notations: The final theory lesson of this course lands upon structural notation. As a musician, you will most likely come across a lot of sheet music in your time. And I wish to prepare you for some of the more general notations revolving around structures and repeats, we will look at repeat signs of multiple endings. Similarly marks, slashes, motley by arrests, and also codas. Firstly, let's recap our knowledge on repeat signs. Repeat signs are special bar lines that contain two dots. When you see these dots, you play through the music as normal until the end of the bar where you have the second two dots. When you get to this point, you go back to the first bar line with the dots and play from there again. So the music contained within these two bar lines with the dots is repeated. By default, you only repeat this once, but there can be text that tells the player to repeat a number of times. We also have alternative endings using repeat sentence. If you ever see a section of music with repeat signs, but also brackets with numbers, we are to play through the music through to the end of the repeat section. We get to the end of the bar marked one, and we go back to the start of the repeat section. We then repeat for a second time round and replace the bar mark with one, with the bar marked with the two queues. Her that would sound. This is very useful for when you have small variations at the end of phrases. It means that you don't have to write the entire sections out twice. Next, let's look at similarly marks. These are used to de-clutter or a peach. This symbol tells one to simply repeat the previous bar. If it has a number over it, it means you repeat the bar for that many times. For example, four bars of a rock groove can be written out like this. It does similarly has two slashes. You repeat the previous two bars. These are very common in drum music as you're usually playing a repeated groove. Next up we have slashes. Slashes are a quick way of indicating improvisation. In the sheet music, there will often be a couple of bars of music and then slashes to basically tell you to keep that vibe going. Sometimes you'll have certain rhythms notated between the slashes. These are to show you what the underlying rhythms are. Again, slashes are very handy for de-cluttering a page for music. Another paper saving trick that composers use is multi by arrests. Multiparous are a quick way of telling him musician to stop playing for a certain amount of bars. The number on the symbol reflects how many bars the count. It's fairly self-explanatory. Imagine you are playing a song that had an intro that lasted 30 bars. Instead of writing out every single bar with nothing in it, you could just write a motley by arrest with the number 30, saves a lot of space. The final thing I want to talk about is the DS al Coda. This is a bit less common, but it's good to be aware of it. There are two symbols you need to learn. There's a signal sign and there's the corridor. Let's look at this example. What we would do is play up to the texts that says DS al Coda. After that we returned to the segment same. We then play as normal until you reach the texts that says To Coda. And then we skip ahead to the coder and carry on. This one's a little bit more complex, but it's something worth memorizing to help you out. I've made a reference poster to keep your memory jogged about all these different structural rotations. If you ever have trouble with anything, please leave a question on the discussion forums or re-watch any of the videos on here. Now, you have a solid grasp of musical notation, structure, and performance. Well done. 74. Learning songs and writing parts: Hello and welcome to the final proper chapter of the course. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how I approach listening and learning music. I'm also going to talk briefly about how you can come up with your own drum parts for your own music. The first thing I want to talk about is how I approach learning songs and listening to music. When I want to learn songs really quickly, I use this simple three-step process. And so far it's worked really well for me. We start by zooming out and looking at the style of song. We then zoom in a bit further and look at the structure of the song. And then finally we zoom in really close and look at the individual drum parts of a song. Okay, so step one is identifying the style of music. It's really good to just sit there and listen to the song and understand what style it is. First, listen to the song and ask yourself, is it rocky? It's a puppy. Is it chill day? Or is it really energetic? Is that medieval chamber orchestra music? It doesn't really matter. Just identify the style, understanding what the style of the music is means that you can actually play the song authentically and really get those kind of stylistic properties in your drumming. So if it's a rocket Union, complete loud and really make it powerful. So if it's a rocket, you and make it really loud and powerful. If it's a slower song and it's a bit more children, maybe you can change up the dynamics and make it a bit softer. Really just identify what the song is as a whole. Next wildlife to do is go through the song and actually learn the structure. This is certainly a skill that will improve over time with practice. Why I like to do is get a blank piece of paper and then listen to the song and then write down the sanctions as they come up. So for example, it could be intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, and then chorus. And just write that down not on the sheet of paper. Once you've got that skeleton structure of the song, go back and listen to it again and then count the bars of each section. So by the end of that, your paper might see intro for bars, verse 18 bars, chorus 16 bars, first 216 bars, et cetera, et cetera. Once you've got that, you've got the entire structure of a song on Monday of paper. It's really handy if you just jamming a song. You can just look over and see where you are and see what's coming up next. I use that trick all the time when I'm learning song as quickly, it makes things a lot easier and it means that you don't have to really learn the entire song note by note. You can just look at the structure and then maybe look at the style, maybe write the style at the top of the music and you'll have a good basis of what the song is. Now comes the third stage of the process of learning a song, which is actually learning the drum parts. This is where your ears really come into their own, really focusing on that one instruments. So you can actually kind of hone in and visualize what the drummer is playing. Once you've focused your ears onto the drums, you can really pick apart what's happening. The first thing I like to do is identify the type of beat. Is it a rock beat? Is our jazz beat. Swing be shuffled. B is at halftime, double time, normal time. Get a general sense of the feel of the group. Once you've got the general vibe of the groove, you can take it even further and identify what each limb is doing. I can start off by figuring out what the right hand is doing and the high hat, or the right symbol or the toms. And then we can identify what the bass drum is doing. And then we can identify what the left hand is doing. And then finally, we can look at the left foot and see if that's doing anything as well. The key is just focusing your ears and really focusing on the drum kit in the song and then visualizing what that drummer might be doing. If you want to take it further, you can write out the drum parts on your sheet of paper and then you'll have a chorus beat, you'll have averse beat, and you have the full song written out in shorthand. You don't have to write the entire thing on the sheet of paper. You can just put like rock beat and then put the kick and snare drum pattern. And then that'll be enough. You can just use that as your safety net. But really, It's all about using your ears. Of course, what you can do is look up sheet music for the song, and that is totally a viable option. That's really handy, but sometimes there isn't that much sheet music out there for songs. So if you are stuck, just use that three-stage methods and that'll get you through this on. Of course, what you could do is just play it over and over again until it's ingrained in your head. And that's totally cool as well. If you really want to learn a song or learn how a certain drummer texts are great option is to transcribe their songs. Transcribing simply means that you take what you hear in audio and you write it down in sheet music. For one of my university projects I transcribed for songs from falls, one of my favorite bands. And I really learned how the drummer jack actually played his beats and learned a lot about how he plays drums. So if you're really into a certain drummer or a certain band, I urge you to do the same. It's very time-consuming, but it's very rewarding as well. You'll learn so much about rhythm and you'll also learn about how the drummer works. You can transcribe video as well. It doesn't have to be just audio. You can search up a YouTube video of someone playing the drums and you can actually see what they're playing and it makes it a little bit easier as well. Next, let's talk about writing your own drum parts for your own music. The first thing you need to consider when you're writing drum parts is what the role of the drummer is gonna be. Is it going to be just driving this on forward? Or is it going to have a more melodic approach where you're playing things that are melodic. And of course there's no right or wrong answer. It's your music so you'll know what you want to do. Also, the role can change. You can start off by playing some cool melodic stuff from the drums. And then as the song kicks in, you go into fill back beat drum groove. Firstly, just identify what the role of the drummer is gonna be. Next, if you've got stuff written for other instruments like guitar or bass or whatever, you can listen to what they're doing and really see this, anything that stands out rhythmically. And you can take that and translate it into the drums. There might be some fun rhythms that worked for bass drum patterns or snare drum accents. Or maybe there might be a rhythm that works well as a fill. The fun part is you are totally in control of that and it's your music. So you just do you, just to demonstrate how different drums can make things sound. I'm going to play the same back on track, but I'm going to change the vibe of the drums. We'll talk about this in a bit more detail in the next lesson. For now, just have fun with these little tricks and either learn songs really quickly or write your own songs. 75. Playing With a Bassist: Hello and welcome to a very special lesson. Today we're gonna be talking about how we play with basis, the basis and the drama of the two forces that interlock and abandon that keep everything together and solid. It's really important that you get locked in with your bass player. It's really important that you get locked in with your bass player because that's going to create a much more cohesive sound to help me record this video. I've got my very good friend, Jonathan Levy playing the bass. Now all we actually did is just set up the cameras and just press record. None of the stuff that you're going to see is actually planned at all and it's completely made up on the spot. What I hope to demonstrate from these experts is just some ideas that you can use in your playing to jam along with the bass player on other musicians. Now, like I said, all of the stuff we're playing is improvised. However, the concepts that I'm gonna be talking about apply to any situation. There's two things you want to do from the get-go when your base is starts playing, the first thing you wanna do is get a feel for the temple and just kind of internalize that. Move your body with that temple. Once you've got that template internalized, just take a listen again and get a feel for the group that is playing. Just try to listen to some rhythms that poke out and that might work well on the drums are really good starting to it for when you're playing with a bassist is to fold the base pattern with your bass drum. So the bass drum follows the bass guitar. I kinda make sense. Take a look at this example here. Notice they start to play that bass drum alongside the bass guitar in those rhythms. When I start to copy that bass guitar rhythm on the bass drum, we start to mesh or a lot more. Here's another example where I'm listening for the base, I'm hearing that you started to do a four and the fourth thing with the chords in the bass guitar. And I start to follow that with my bass drum. A lot of playing with musicians involves listening and reacting to that. Really listen to what's going on with the other players. And that's going to help you form a group. The nice thing is this course has been designed to give you the ability to hear something and play it physically on the drop-ins. So now you can listen to stuff and hear what other people are playing and form groups that way. And you'll have the coordination, you'll have to technical skill to actually play it. So you start off with the temple, get a feel for the groove, and then kinda listen out for some rhythms that might work well with the bass drum. Another thing is that you should watch out for dynamics. If the basis gets quieter, you should also try to get quieter. That way again, you're much more cohesive. Here's an example of that. Another use for Dynamics is when a player starts to solo, you want to give that person the moment to shine. So maybe just pull back on the drums and let them have their moment. I'm just kinda keep a group going. You don't want to step on their feet by playing really loud drums over there solo. Now that's just the tip because there might be times when a guitar player soloing and it gets really energetic, you want to bring up the drums for that. Again, it just comes down to listening and just knowing what's going on. Now another tip for when you're playing with musicians and basis is that you don't want to just play as loud as you can, as fast as you can all the time. Of course, if it's a drum solo, go for it. But if you're playing with other musicians, you really want to be considerate about what they're doing. And you don't want to just do your own thing over there. It does start to sound really disjointed and weird if you just start to do really crazy stuff with no consideration about what else is going on in the music. Here's an example of that. And look at the very start. You might see my stick break. It's quite funny. It just goes flying across the room. But yeah, hopefully that gives you an idea of how to start playing with basis and other musicians. The key is listening and reacting to what's going on, and also making eye contact and just making sure that you're on the same page. I'd like nodding to each other when you want to get louder and stuff. It's all just communication. My advice to you is just grab a basest, get them in your practice room, and just start playing. Honestly, playing with other musicians is such a joy and it's so much fun. And that's one of the best parts about music. Don't be scared. And if you are intimidated, get someone at the same level as you. And you're both be learning at the same time about new things and how to play with each other. There's never any pressure and it's so much fun. So honestly give it a go. 76. Some Books you might enjoy!: Alright guys, how's it going? We're near the end of the course. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to just do a chill video about some of my favorite books to unwind and just decompress after this crazy, crazy course. The great thing now is that we have the knowledge to read and write music, which means we can extract all the amazing content and knowledge of these different books. It really is one of the benefits of reading music is that you can actually use these books to their full potential. And that is why at the start of the course, I was really hammering home the theory. Hopefully it's paid off. Now when you first go shopping for drum books, it can be very overwhelming. There's hundreds and hundreds of different books. And they all sound so amazing. And what I did was just buy a bunch of them and I've not actually read half of them. Hopefully to prevent that from happening to yourself and buying way too many books and being completely overwhelmed by all. I've narrowed it down to six of my favorite drum books in my collection. Now these are bricks that I personally enjoy it and got a lot of, it's gonna be different for you. And it really just depends on where you want to go with your drumming. Do you want to be an absolute shredded demons and just be able to play really fast and play all the jumps all the time. Then there's some books out there for that. But if you want to be a groove drama and just play all these cool different groups. There's books for that as well. Hopefully these books are gonna give you a bit of both though. We'll start off with one of my favorite, favorite books ever, which is stick controlled by George Lawrence stored. This book is basically regarded as the Bible for drummers. This thing is old as well. I think it's from like 1930s or 1920s. But it's just pages and pages of snare drum rhythms that are just going to help you build up hand speed, coordination, all that good stuff. It really is regarded as one of the essential drunk v6 for any drummer. The nice thing is that you can play all these patterns with your hands, but you can also play it with your feet. So if you ever want to get into double bass drumming, this is a great way to do it. Moving on, we've got Ted read syncopation book. Now this is a very versatile book because it's just pages and pages of different rhythms and patterns that you can use. You can use all these patterns as different comping patterns that you can practice with your swing groove. Another one that I highly recommend. Now one of my absolute, absolute favorite books is language of drawing by Benny grab. Now this book is very special because firstly it's signed by him. But also because it shows you how you can use a simple concept in drumming and take it so far and get so much out of it. Now this book revolves around a simple alphabet of different patterns. And then he shows you how you can use these different contexts. I just get so much out of a simple idea. So I really recommend this book is about language of Drumming by Benny grip, is probably the one I've used the most. Or another favorite of mine is advanced techniques for the modern drummer by Jim Chapman. Now it says modern drummer, but this was made quite a while ago. So it's really for jazz music. This is really going to help you with your different phrases of John's camping. And it's gonna give you the coordination that you need to do jazz well, so again, if you want to get into jazz, fantastic book. Now if you want to get fast on the drums, I recommend buddy richest snare drum rudiments. This book goes through a bunch of different rudiments and it's fantastic for building up your hand speed, strength, and endurance. There's so many different rudiments in here that you're going to be an absolute boss when you finish this, you're gonna be able to play interesting freezers and play them fast and accurately. The nice thing about this book is that he talks you through every single regiment. So you're not just greeted by a wall of sheet music. There's actually a bit of text and it shows you how you can use it in different contexts, and it's fantastic. Now, last but not least, is the breakbeat Bible. Now if you want to be at group-based drummer, this book is the Bible. If you want to specialize in funk music or hip hop music, or drum and bass music perhaps then this book is what you want to go through. It goes through all these different elements of different groups and it shows you how you can use them in different ways. And it also shows you different examples from songs that you can go and look up on here for yourself. If you really want to stay in a funky than this book is awesome. And that there is six of my favorite drum books that don't fall into the trap of buying a drum book. And then thinking, oh, I've immediately got that knowledge. You really have to work at it to get that knowledge out of the book. Practice with the book, play along to stuff, and then you can really extract the most out of every single book. I said book about 50 times there. But anyway, the point is still stands. If there's one book I could choose, it would either be stick control book or language drumming. They're both fantastic books. And yet hopefully that gives you a few ideas of where you can take your learning next. If you want to learn more about these books, just check out the link in the lesson resources. Anyway, I hope that was a nice little video and you can relax and decompress after this crazy course. But hopefully you enjoy some of those books. 77. Taking your playing to the next level: Hello and welcome to what is gonna be the final lesson in this course. We've been through quite a lot and it's been a lot of challenges on the way, but congratulations, you've made it to the end. At this point in the course, you're going to be a very competent drummer. You're gonna be able to play lots of different things and you're gonna be gig ready. And that's a great place to be as a drummer, you can go play music with people and it's really fun. Wanted to do in this little lesson is, you know, answer the question of what annexed, where can we take our drumming now? What do we do to get our plane to the next level? If you're happy at the level you're at now, then amazing, I'm so happy for you and I hope you enjoy your drumming. If you do want to take it further, I suggest you do these little things. The first thing and the most important thing that's going to improve your drumming from here is just playing with other people, playing with other musicians. Playing by yourself is really valuable. And practicing by yourself is super valuable and it makes you a better drummer. But what happens when you play with other musicians is that you become a better musician. And the goal of playing drums is of course to play music. So it makes sense that you play music with other people, playing with other people. It's gonna be a completely different experience from playing to your iPod or your Spotify. It's gonna be a live situation. You're going to have to keep eye contact. You're going to have to react to different musicians. And you're gonna have to listen very carefully to what's going on. Improving your listening skills is one of the most important things you can do as a musician. If you're playing as loud as you can, as fast as you can all the time with other musicians, then you're not really listening to what's going on. Playing with other musicians is such an invaluable skill as a drummer. So just messaged a musician friends, or go to the local Jamnagar, or just go to an open mic and see what's happening. And if you're feeling up for it, go on stage and have some fun with those people. There's absolutely no reason to be nervous, and it's so much fun with. My second tip for you is to listen to a lot more music than you normally would. So back when I started playing drums, I listened to basically blink on it too, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and that's about it. But when I went to university, I was introduced to all these different types of music. It can really be overwhelming, but it's also really exciting, broadening your horizon and having an open mind about music you want to listen to is a great tool. And it's something that's gonna be very valuable for you if you just want to be on down the line rock drummer than amazing. And you enjoy listening to rock than fantastic. Listen to that to your heart's content. But also maybe, maybe listen to some Latin music or jazz music, and then apply that stuff to your role-playing. Having all these different influences from rock, jazz music, folk music, funky music, whatever, bringing them all together will create your sound. And that is really important, actually crafting your own sound. It's great that you want to send out your favorite drummer. But the thing is that you are going to sound like you and you're going to sunlight you. The best. Listening to a variety of music is going to help you develop your own style. You might listen to some Latin music and Hera cool drum fill that you're going to try it out. And you may listen to some jazz music and think that's a really cool beat. And all these different influences are going to make up the style of your music. So my second tip is just simply listened to as much music as possible. Those first two examples were to do with musicianship and becoming a good musician and finding your own voice. But now let's talk about how we actually become a better drummer. The main thing that helped me when I was actually learning how to play drums on improved myself. It's actually have a dedicated practice time. And in that practice time I recommend you actually structure in a way where you've got different learning outcomes and different focuses and different parts of the practice time. So for example, the first ten minutes could be a warm-up. Then the second ten minutes could be just hand patterns and working on your hand speed and technique. And then the next ten minutes could be working on your accuracy and then your speed. And then 30 minutes could be working on songs. I'm a firm believer that ten minutes of focused practice on one aspect of drums is much better than just two hours I've just kickin about and doing whatever. Because you aren't really focused on you're concentrating on that thing for ten minutes, and that's the only thing you're concentrating on. You'll learn it a lot quicker. You've got to make sure that you dedicate some time to have some fun though. Because what happened to me was I just spent the entire time that I practice just on a practice part, practicing hand speed and coordination and technique. And I just hated it. I became a much better drummer because of it. But when I got to the drum kit, I just didn't want to play it anymore. So absolutely remember to have fun when you're practicing. But yeah, that is my third tip. Use focused practice and you'll improve a lot quicker, but don't take it too far and burn yourself out. My fourth tip is again to do with drum practice, that you don't want to practice, stuff that you already know. Now, I am super, super guilty for this because to sit by and I just practiced stuff that I know I'd feel good about myself. But the point of practice is that you're meant to be ironing out the kinks and improving stuff that you're not good at. If you sound really good when you're practicing, you're not practicing the right stuff. You're meant to send a bit rubbish when you're practicing, That's the point of practice. So if you're shredding away and you're sending perfect practice, something else that you can do. Like I said though, I'm very guilty for this, but what you should do is identify your flaws and practice on them first. So maybe your left hand needs work and that's been focused. Practice comes in, you focus on your left hand and then maybe you'll find something else that your right foot is not as strong. And then you focus on that again. Just constantly analyze what's going on in your drumming. A great tip to actually point out flaws in your playing is to record yourself drumming. This happens a lot to me. I recorded, I think it's amazing. And then a playback and then I think, Oh my God, what am I doing with my left hand? Why is my pinky sticking out or I'm way out of time or something and the recording does not lie. It's a great practice to when it can really help identify flaws in your playing. Of course, you'd never going to be flawless. There's always gonna be things that you're going to nitpick and that's okay, that's just part of being a musician. I think it'll definitely highlight the big issues though. Tip number five is simply don't stop learning. Always have an eagerness to learn. My final tip, which is tip number five, is don't stop being creative and don't stop being curious. What I mean by this is that should always be curious about different aspects of drumming. Maybe like double based drumming or Latin music. Are they, how do they do that? Always be keen to explore different parts of drumming. Don't get complacent. I think the more you learn about drumming, the more you realize you don't know anything about drumming because there's just so much out there. Maybe get some new specialized books that are going to help you in one subject. Or maybe get some lessons with a specific jazz drummer that you like, or specific rock drummer you like. It's such a large subject, it can be overwhelming. But I think the key is to find something that you wanna do and just go for it. This course has been designed to get you to a plateau that's a high level. And then you can take it from there and whichever direction you want to go. The main thing is that whatever you do, you just have fun with it. I know that sounds quite cheesy, but it's the truth. Drumming is fun. You get to whack things and they make noise and it's loud and it's awesome. Just remember that you get to hit things and you get to have fun and you get to make music with pals. And what more could you ask for? I really hope this course has been fun. I'm actually gonna do a separate video doing the whole well done thing. So I'm going to shut up and you can go to that video now. 78. Well done!: I'm sure the title of this video is kinda given away the message already, but we've reached the end of the course. And I just wanted to say a massive, massive, Well done team to get to this point in the course is a massive achievement in itself. And I hope you're proud of yourself. Hopefully by this point you feel like you're confident drummer and you can go out and play to your songs or play with different musicians, start a band, whatever. The point of this course was to get you to a really high standard of drumming, and then you can take it in any direction from there, the next step is totally up to you in terms of what you wanna do with your drumming. Now you can hopefully feel confident that you've got a solid foundation and you've got a good knowledge base of drums. It's genuinely been so much fun to do this course, and I really hope that you've enjoyed it. I started doing this course about 18 months ago. I started planning it. And planning are the lessons and the sheet music. And now I think this is the second last video I'm actually recording. So for me, this is kinda mentor. For me. This has been absolutely incredible. It's been a lot of work doing all the editing, filming, dropping all by myself, but I hope the passion comes through and that you've genuinely enjoyed it. I want to say thank you so much for putting your faith in me to teach you drums. And I really hope that you've learned a few things and that you can go off and play drums and get some joy of it. But yeah, I don't really have much else to say apart from well done, I'm incredibly proud. Thank you so much. And also, don't stop here. Just go out and do what you wanna do with drums. And don't stop because the course is finished. Take care unhappy drumming.