How to Play a Bass Drum

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Series Summary

The drum is the oldest known musical instrument in the history of man and its basic design has not changed in thousands of years. Far from today’s uses as a percussive foundation for pop music or for fueling marching band excitement, drumming has a more profound history as a method of communication, and the drum as an implement of religious symbolism. The drum was perhaps first created from the primal idea of mimicking the human heartbeat, yet today its music has developed into a technical, complex arrangement of beats and grooves. Different sized drums and cymbals are arranged into kits, where a drummer can pick from a variety of sounds to lead or accompany a particular song. Kit sizes vary from the simple to the outrageous.

The modern approach to drumming is to try and master the fundamentals of beat and time signature, and then to create fresh, innovative patterns and fills for each song. In this free instructional video series you will learn how to play a drum beat and the bass drum independently of one another. Our expert Kevin Grossman shares techniques for creating a basic drum beat, adding fills, and offers tips and advice on how to begin the process and walks you through some great informational steps to becoming a more advanced drummer.

Video Transcript

"So in this series we're going to talk about some Bass Drum coordination. What I did is I made up some rock and roll drum beats, seven of them, that we're going to go through. Here they are on the paper. They?re a little bit more complicated. You can see the bass drum is incorporating some 16th note off the beat with the snare drum. The snare drum is mostly playing on the back beat but as we go through you'll be playing some extra notes. So what we're going to do is I'm going to play them for you and then in the next clip I'll break it down for you. Each pattern, each part, each hand, each limb, how the limbs fall together, to make it nice and easy for you to play. So I'll just do a quick example of what one of these beats is going to sound like."