How to Play the Drums

Video Transcript

"First of all, be prepared to practice a lot. You're going to have to get used to the coordination of limbs. That's just one thing that takes time and practice. The other thing is if you can afford to, get yourself a good instructor and take lessons once a week. It's just, you're going to progress a lot faster if you've got somebody who already knows what they're doing, showing you how and checking on your progress each week. Those two things said, let's take a look at some things that can help you free up your coordination and get used to working all four of your limbs together. So I'm going to show you the basics of how to construct just a simple rock beat. So I'll mention some very basic music terms in here. Hopefully you know them. I'll try not to get too technical. But how we're going to start out, we're going to play eighth notes, what's called eighth notes on the high hat. And basically the way you count those is one and two and three and four and. So it's eight hits, eight hits total within the measure and then it recycles back to one. So the way we do that is one and, two and, three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and. And that's your high hat. Then once you get comfortable with that, you're going to add in your bass drum or your kick drum on beats one and three. So combining those two together you're going to get one and, two and, three and, four and, one and. So that's combining your high hat and your bass drum. Then once you've got that going and you've coordinated that pretty well and you feel comfortable with it, you can add in your left hand on the snare drum on beats two and four. So that's going to be, one and, two and... So that's your very, very basic rock beats to just get yourself used to working all four limbs to get, well three of your four limbs together. We can add the left foot in on other stuff later. Don't worry about that too much for right now. Once you get comfortable with that, you can add little variations, probably starting with the kick drum, keeping the snare on two and four, keeping the high hat on eighth notes. You can just add in stuff like, one and, two and, three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and. Simple things like that and before you know it... just varying your bass drum and then you can get the variations on the snare. Get yourself coordinating your limbs, then vary it a little bit and once you're used to it, you can start experimenting all around the drum kit as long as you keep things in time. And that's the most important thing."