How to Play Slow Drum Beats

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Ken Marcou and I’m going to talk a little bit about playing slow beats. Slow beats are more important than one might think, in a slow song the beat is very important for keeping it going because a slow song you know some people think it could get boring so you need to keep it going with the beat, you just keep pushing it along but not being too over baring. So there’s ways to do that, that are very settled you know the beat itself is simple I’ll be showing you that in one moment but you can also use your sticks in the other parts of the drum kit to be musical with your slow simple otherwise boring beat. So for instance I’m going to just play around a little bit using some of the other drums as fillers because ultimately your beat is made up of your kick drum, your snare drum and your hi-hat more than any other devise on the drum kit so here we go…so that is a slow beat with some filler aspects of it, there I played a nice soft and controlled beat with a hi-hat closed, from there I moved forward into opening the hi-hat to create a safe way and I changed the sort of overall vibe of the song by playing the bell of the ride cymbal and adding in some cymbal crashes and adding in some subtle tom hits just to create a feeling of fluidity in the slow beat."