Quality Drum Practice

Series Summary

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. Modern drummers, including the likes of Buddy Rich, Billy Cobham, Neal Peart, Dave Weckl, and Jimmy Chamberlain, have helped drummers develop their playing skills by inspiring new beat and rhythm patterns, new combinations of sound upon sound. The modern approach to drumming, then, is to try and master the fundamentals of beat and time signature, and then to create fresh, innovative patterns and fills for each song. Learning how to play the drums requires practice. If you would like to learn drum practice techniques to help you learn how to play the drums you can learn for free in these free online drum lessons. In this free video series of drum lessons learn about practicing the drums from drum teacher Colby Wahl. Colby will give you drum practice tips to help you become a better drummer. He will give you drumming tips such as why it is important to set goals for drum practice, why you warm up before playing the drums, why you should learn the drum rudiments, how to get more drumming inspiration, why it is important to train your ears for the drums, and more.

Video Transcript

"This next series of clips is going to be my advice really on how to practice and every day I am still learning on how to improve my practice so you should be open to as much advice as possible basically. The first topic is quality, not quantity. A lot of people ask how many hours a day do you practice and that is not really the important thing. It is how efficiently you are practicing and when you choose to do it. Basically you still need to learn how to practice smart and still every day like I said I am still working on improving it myself in how I practice so it never really ends. One thing that you can do to make this process easier and a little more fun is to set some goals for yourself, set some short term goals. Something like suppose you need to learn to play a Basonova with a jazz jam and you had a song Blue Baso and you had no idea how to play a Basonova so your short term goal was to go home and learn that okay? So a Basonova goes something like this, if I were to do a two three clave it is this. Okay coordination wise that takes a little while to get down but it is just like anything else we have talked about you have got to isolate the problem areas, just start with your feet and add the right symbol and after that the clava is very tricky, this cross sticking thing, we will have to talk about that later but basically you just add one note at a time, once you add that you loop it and start with the next note so I will start with this and then add this and once you have that down eventually you keep going and eventually the whole pattern is this. I am going to play it a little faster because then you can see how cool it really sounds. So there you have a demonstration of a Basonova. Basically you have achieved a short term goal. You have learned how to do that so a good practice is to set some long term goals. For me one of mine is to travel to Brazil and actually experience the culture and to hear a Basonova for real so that is one of my long term goals but I am working towards it. Another piece of advice is as far as you are practicing on the quality not quantity when you are trying to practice smart also it is better to do a little each day than it is to take seven days off and play it like three hours. If you can only get to the drums for 15 minutes a day then do that. You learn quicker that way I find at least with a lot of my students that seems to work for them. Okay let's move. "