How to Play Quarter Notes on Drums

One primary element of drumming is inserting notes into pre-arranged rhythms. Playing quarter notes on drums is a relative task: the nature of quarter notes and other time meters has to do with the tempo of your drumming and your chronological setup. Here's how to get quarter notes into your drum riff.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Start up a beat. The most common beat in many genres is a 4/4 cadence, composed of 4 beats per bar. Count these off to yourself--1, 2, 3 and 4. If you have a metronome to keep time, use it: otherwise, try to set up a consistent pattern by counting.
2. Hit a drum on each beat. Each of these four beats are your quarter notes, so called because each one is a quarter of the whole bar. Notes twice as short as these are eighth notes, etc.
3. Assign a drum to each beat. One way to use quarter notes is to set up a repeating structure where each beat is predictably accompanied by a certain sound, for example, hitting the bass drum on 1, 2, 3 and the snare on 4.
4. Add multiple drums for a collection of quarter notes. You could hit the bass on 1 and 3, then hit the hi hat on all beats, and hit the snare on 4. In this case, the hi hat hits would be your quarter notes.
5. Syncopate quarter notes. Playing on beat is not the only way to play quarter notes: syncopated beats are essentially still quarter notes, they're just offset. Try hitting a drum in between beats 1 and 2, beats 3 and 4, etc. These are syncopated quarter notes that provide a different kind of rhythm.