Playing 8th Note Rock Beats on Drums

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 music lesson video series an experienced drumming instructor, Peter Van Dyck, will demonstrate several tips and patterns for the rock drum beat. Van Dyck will begin by suggesting a few useful drum practicing tips to help improve feel and coordination. He'll then demonstrate the rock drum beat patterns one through four. Adding variance to these drum patterns is quite simple when incorporating eighth notes into the patterns. Watch these free videos, and learn to play rock beats on a drum set today!

Video Transcript

"OK, so in this session, let me take a look at the eighth note rock beat. WIth the bass drum I always play on one and three. Let me show you what that is all about. So we have eighth notes on the hi hat, a back beat on beat three, snare, one, two, three, four, one two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And here we're going to be laying the bass drum always on beats one and three. But then also, to expand on bass drum rock vocabulary, be playing the bass drum off the beat as well."