Hello! I’m Wes Crawford and we’re going to continue our study of how to play drum set more for a beginner and intermediate level player now, and we’re going to talk about varying the bass drum. As we’ve said, the snare drum in rock and popular music styles is most often found on beats two and four as we count one, two, three, four. But the bass drum can vary a lot, and a lot of times we’ll want the rhythm of the bass drum to more closely match the rhythm that the bass guitar player play and that create a sort of a united front down on the low-end. It doesn’t mean every node has to match by any needs but you want to keep that in mind and that’s a big reason why we’ll want to vary the bass drum or just create rhythmic interest.
Okay, so let’s continue doing what we’ve been doing playing eighth notes on the hi-hat and then hitting two and four on the snare drum. Now if you learn to read rhythms, there’re many, many books on this subject and you can get all kinds of further information from them. I urge you to copy these and if you copy all of these beats, you’ll have the independents, interdependence necessary to play lots of eighth note bass drum rhythms.
Here is the first one and we keep this going [Demonstration]. So with that, a very popular beat [Demonstration]. The second one I’ll show you. [Demonstration]
Now it can help to sing this too so that you can memorize them. For instance, I would say this one, boom bah, boom boom bah, boom bah, boom boom bah. So now, I’m going to sing them and then I’m going to play them and I think you should try to do the same too particularly as you play it longer or if you’re reading music to get your beat. Try singing it so that you can know that you internalize it and you’re not dependent upon the written notes. How about this one? [Demonstration]
Or how about this one, we’ll expand upon that. [Demonstration]
Now that snare drum has been very consistent on two and four. Now if we want to think about the count of such a beat that would have been [Demonstration]. Remember to learn any of these beats particularly as they get a little more complex to hear the sound and to be able to sing them helps to understand them intellectually if you’re counting helps and then it helps to actually play them to the muscles. So you want to know them all these different ways so that they will really stay with you.
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