How to Play a Cha Cha Drum Beat

Video Transcript

"PAT LOUIS: On behalf Expert Village, I'm Pat Louis in Miami, Florida. And today, I'm going to show you some basic drum rhythms. There are variety of Latin beats that are available and that people like to hear, and in every event, you're going to have people ask you for a cha-cha and different type of Latin beats. So, with cha-cha, I usually take the snare off, so that you can hear that sound and then - the Latin beat is - that would be your bass drum and then you'd have the sounds on this snare. So what you have is the bass drum going--giving you a steady boom, boom, boom-boom-boom and in the snare, we're actually taking the snare part off using the tom-tom sound and giving me that flat rim against the stick sound because generally, people all use - this is the pace where they can use the cowbells. The cowbell becomes a part of the Latin sound - the steady one, two, three, four, all the way through to that cha-cha-cha sound on the snare with the stick. So if you've got that cha-cha-cha, thump-thump-thump happening every measure - at some place in the measure, you've got your cha-cha sound."