Hi! I am Wes Crawford. And now that we know how to use all of our limbs separately, we are going to do combinations.
People watch drums that players perform and they go, “Wow, how does each limb have its own brain and they can do all these things at the same time?” Well, what we’re really doing is we’re teaching independence of the limbs through achieving interdependence. And what our brains do wonderfully is take separate actions and combine them into single entities. They don’t think about what each limb is doing separately and then sort of keep track of what is going on at the same time. The brains are not too good at that but brains are great at taking different actions and combining them into single entities. And so, as long as we know this, we can achieve muscle memory with actions through correct repetition of these actions, and muscle memory means if the brain has done exactly what I said. It’s seeing this action and this coordination of different muscles so many times together then it learns it as a single entity and you don’t have to consciously think of it anymore.
So as long as you use these rules of biology, then we can progress most quickly. So this is how you should think of using your limbs with the drum set.
So, let’s go through these set of exercises and we’ll basically cover all the possibilities of limb combinations. Keep doing each one over and over until you’re comfortable with it and then go to the next one. I’m just going to run through them all right now but you might have to pause so that you can keep practicing each one.
First, let’s just do our hands together and we’re going to play everything so that you can hear most easily, right hand on right cymbal, left-hand on snare drum, right foot on base drum and left foot on the foot high-hat, so, right hand and left hand together, pretty easy, huh?
[Demonstration]
And again, we want a perfect blended sound, not two sounds happening almost together. We want them exactly together.
The next thing, our feet, and you can hear this, right foot and left foot together.
[Demonstration]
So far, these are pretty natural. Let’s try the right side of our body together as the right hand and the base drum.
[Demonstration]
You’ll use that combination a whole lot. Let’s try the left side of the body together in pairs. Again, all these have been pairs, so the snare drum and the foot hi-hat
[Demonstration]
Now, let’s cross limbs. Let’s do right hand and left foot [Demonstration]. How about left-hand and right foot? [Demonstration]
All of these little tidbits of coordination can be combined to create all kinds of interesting drum set, beats, fills, and lines.
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