Hi! I am Wes Crawford.
As we’re studying the drum set and how to play it, we often have to picture ourselves as time travelers and that’s because time is divided up in music most often in even units called beats and we often feel the beat of the music as we listen to it. It can be slow; it can be fast but it’s even beats.
But what musicians, and particularly people who deal with rhythm have to do is go in between those beats and travel through time and create rhythms by emphasizing different parts within the beats, and this might sound complicated but I am going to show you it’s really not, and just follow these examples step-by-step.
Now, in music, we often define our beats in four-four time. And what these means is we count to four over and over. We group in our mind the steady pulses or beats in groups of four, so we count one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. If it’s a fast beat, it might be one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. If it’s a slow beat, it might be one-two-three-four, and so on. At this point, we’re not going to deal with written notes but we do need to know that the beat is a quarter-note so we can understand how all the other notes work with the quarter note and how they all interact with each other.
It’s a fraction base system. If we play quarter notes, we’re playing exactly with the beat. For instance, if I played quarter notes on the snare drum and I was counting one-two-three-four, I’d play one-two-three-four, and I am playing quarter notes.
If I play twice as fast, I am playing eighth notes just because in fractions, two-eighths equals a quarter. So, we count the same numbers, one, two, three and four with eighth notes but since we have twice as many of them, we have to say something in between the numbers and we simply say and. So you’ve heard people count off music like this, one and two and three and four. You’ve probably seen that on TV or somewhere.
So, we can count eighth notes, one and two and three and four and. And in so doing, we’re playing twice as fast as quarter notes. If this is our quarter note, our eighth notes would be one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. So we had quarter notes playing here and eighth notes on the snare drum.
Sixteenth notes as you’ve already guessed are twice as fast as eighth notes or four times as fast as quarter notes. We count the one in the end and the two in the end and so forth with sixteenth notes. But now that we have twice as many of them, we have to say something in between all these other syllables and we’ll say, e or a. We’ll say after the number, well say the syllable e. After the and, we’ll say a. So now we’d count sixteenth notes, one e and the two e and the three e and the four e and the one e and the two e and the three e and the four e and the [Demonstration].
Now, that we understand how all these notes work, let’s play our feet to keep the beat. We’ll play our feet together, bass drum and hi-hat together and that will be the quarter note. And as I said earlier, that’s the beat. One-two-three-four, so then let’s travel through time as we keep this beat.
We’ll first play one measure and a measure is the time it takes to count to four one time. We’ll just count to four one time where we’re playing the hands, alternating the hands as a quarter note. So, it’ll play right along with these. Then, we’ll double the speed for the next measure and we’ll play one and two and three and four and, with the hands. So it’ll be going twice as fast as what the feet are playing. Then we’ll play one measure of sixteenth notes where we’re counting one e and the two e and the three e and the four e and the, going four times as fast as the feet are playing.
Let’s try that, one-two-three-four, one and two and three and four, and one e and the two e and the three e and the four e and one, two, three, four, one and two and three and four, and one e and the two e and the three e and the four e and the—and so forth.
I urge you to practice this over and over because this is very important for drummers to understand because we will use this type of thing over and over. You have to understand the subdivisions of the basic pulse or beat. And it’s all mathematical because math is what—it fills right in our mind. This is what we understand and this is what sounds right to our ear. So, it’s all mathematical based and it is pretty simple. We’re just doubling the speed and then we went back down to the original beat and we kept repeating that over and over. We’ll expand upon this concept in a later lesson.
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