Drumming Terms
In this video lesson, we’ll be going over several basic drum-related terms that you’ll need to know as a drummer. This information will be valuable to you as you progress through various lessons on this website. It’s also great for our discussing drumming in online discussion forums, or with your drumming friends and the guys at the local music store. Let’s start with the basic terms on the drum set. So right here, I got my bass drum. Then, right in front of me, is my snare drum. Then I have the two toms up here. Now, this is the first tom, the second tom, or what they call a high tom, mid tom, and some people like to call them rock toms. Then below, I have a 16 inch floor tom or the low tom. Now over here, I got my high hats cymbals. Right beside that I have a crash cymbal. Over here I have another crash and then the ride cymbal. Now down here, I have my high hat pedal, and this just moves the high hats up and down. Then I have a double bass drum pedal, so I have one on the left and one on the right. If we look even closer, we can examine more specific terms. Let’s take a look at the snare drum. First we have the rim, which pulls down the drum head. Now, what pulls down the rim is the tension rods here on the side. And they’re also used to tune the drum. And then those tension rods go into the lugs, these are Yamaha new vol lugs, but, lugs are pretty much the same, these act little bit differently, but, pretty much all the same. Then we have snare drum throw off on the left over here, but sometimes on the right, how do you set up your snare drum. That’s on the left, and those hold the snare drum wires on below the drum. So you can turn it off, and turn it on. See how the snares sound. Now, let’s look at the toms. They operate quite similar to the snare drum. Obviously, they just don’t have the snare drum wires on them. They have the rim, they have the tension rods. And now, one thing you need to know about toms is they have the batter head, which is the top head, and then they have the resonance head. Same as the snare drum. So the batter head, batter means that’s the one you hit. The resonance head is the one you don’t hit. It’s usually in the bottom. It’s used to make the drum resonate. Now let’s move to the cymbals. So there’s three main points to the cymbal. In the center, we have the bell, then the bough, then we have the edge. And this applies to all the cymbals. Here we have a bell, the bough, the edge, same with the ride and my other crash. Now all the cymbals are supported by stands, over here, I have a boom stand. Now, there are some cymbal stands which are just straight, which is no boom, and then, the cymbals are screwed on, with a felt on top and below to protect the cymbal from running away. And then tighten with a wing nut. Now believe it or not, there are several terms related to drum sticks. We have the shoulder of the stick, then the whole shaft here, then we have the tip, there’s wood tip, and nylon tip, the butt end, and below here, they have the model and the name of the stick. Now, I’m sure there are many other terms that I might have missed, but I’ll be posting, in text form, all the other terms on the freedrumlessons.com website. So you can go there and review them all.