Playing Drums With Drum Brushes

Video Transcript

"So in this step, we're going to take a look at how to use brushes, wire brushes. As you can see, these are wire brushes, and just little tiny wires, and you can see they're all bent up and stuff, that's just from years of playing and that will happen. And they're supposed to, if you pull this out, they're supposed to close, and these go back into here, but they won't any more because they're all bent, but that's okay. The more bent, the better. So these are wire brushes. Now, what you want to do, you just hold them like regular drum sticks, okay? If we can pretend this is the butt, that little ring, you just hold them like this. Okay? Now typically you use brushes in the genre of jazz music. But you can use them for any type of music because it's a unique and different type of sound. The first type of technique that we're going to take a look at is the circular pattern which is probably one of the most popular types of ways to use the brushes and that is typically with the left hand. And as you can tell, it just gives us a real nice little sh-sh-sh sound especially if you're playing a little jazz, a little quiet. Now the other way is to do the same thing with your left hand but in a figure eight pattern. And what this does for you is instead of going right here in the same basic area, you're getting more of the drum, like around the rim and stuff like that. So just real light, and just picture that you're drawing an eight on your snare drum. Now the other thing you can do too, is you can also use both hands. That just gives it a nice texture that's really strange and different just gives it really a lot of vibe. You can do the same thing on the toms. Because even though they're basically the same sound, you can hear that this one up here, with my left hand it's kind of a higher pitch where as this one is a little bit lower, because obviously the heads or the drums are tuned, this one's higher, this one's lower, okay? So that is how you would use the circular motion or the figure eight pattern if you'd like, on your drums using the wire brushes."