Hi, I am Wes Crawford and we’re going to talk about the names of the drums.
First, the most fundamental drum as part of our drum set is the Snare Drum [Demonstration]. It has a very sharp, snappy sound because of the snare wires on the bottom.
The next most fundamental part of the drum set is the Base Drum. We play that with the foot and that’s the lowest member of the family in the drum set and has a nice punch, low thud to it.
The High-Hat is a set of two cymbals on a stand which can be controlled by the foot to get different sounds. Most often, we’ll play it with the stick. [Demonstration] It can be closed or open or anywhere in between [Demonstration]. So, we can get a lot of expression out of the High-Hat. And you might notice that these three fundamental parts of our drum set came from the marching band, the New Orleans marching band, which is where the drum set came from, from when the—someone invented the base drum pedal to put the whole set of instruments together as a kit.
Next, let’s talk about the Toms or the Tom-Toms. These are basically the same drum just different sizes, and so we can get different pitches [Demonstration]. We usually refer to these as high Tom, mid Tom, low Tom. You will see drum sets that have more Toms or fewer Toms, but they’re all the Toms. They can give a nice round tone to them and we’ll use them as parts of beats or in fills which we will discuss at another point.
We also have cymbals surrounding us very often. And usually, the biggest one is the Ride Cymbal. Although we can crash it, we most often play patterns with the tip of the stick on it. Other cymbals around the set could be Crash Cymbals and we hit them with a glancing blow so as not to put all the stress right into the middle of the cymbal and potentially crack it. We can have different sizes which will be different pitches of Crash Cymbals. If we have a smaller cymbal, it could be a Splash Cymbal. We can also have other kinds of different special effect cymbals.
But a basic drum set has a Base Drum, Snare Drum, High-Hat, a Ride Cymbal, and at least one Crash Cymbal, and then some number of Toms. I consider a basic set three Toms. You’ll see a lot of rock and roll kids right now particularly that have two Toms, but I like the idea of creating patterns out of a set of three—high, mid and low.
And those are the members of the drum set.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services