Hi, I am Wes Crawford. And we’re now going to learn our first two rock beats.
If you already know the two-beat, yes, that’s used in rock. But rock is mostly based in eighth notes. Now, we’re not going to explain how to read notes or anything like that where this whole course is assuming you don’t know how to read rhythms. We can talk about that at another time. But we do want to understand all the coordination necessary for learning these beats, so we’re taking that point of view.
For the very first rock beat, it’s like the two-beat except we’re adding a single hi-hat sound in between each of the other two events. So, it’ll go like this. We’ll do the right side of our body that is the right limbs hitting on the bass drum and hi-hat followed by another hi-hat. Then we’ll do evenly space, not taking these time gaps here, we are doing both our hands together followed by another hi-hat, and so you get this [Demonstration].
Work on that until you are comfortable. Start slowly. You can start slower than I did, that’s fine. There will be lots of songs out there that are slow and the more practice you have playing slowly, the better feel you’ll have for these slower songs. Drummers tend to practice everything as fast as they can do it and then they have a pretty good feel for fast songs and can do it but they sometimes don’t feel as good for slow songs. There’s nothing wrong with practicing slowly. Then you can speed it up.
Do not play these coordination beats and patterns from slow to fast to slow all within the exercise kind of style because that might subliminally give you the message that it’s okay to change the speed when you’re playing with somebody and it’s not. Very generally, it’s not. So find a tempo or speed of the beat and just stay with it for a while. Remember, pat yourself on the back when you can play any of these beats that we show you or any of these patterns for eight times. And yeah, that’s a great accomplishment. But most songs on the radio are going to be three to four minutes long, so don’t really pat yourself on the back until you know you can stay at the same speed, no mistakes, and play the pattern for three or four minutes long.
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