A lot of drummers think that their tom’s can only be used in the fills. Well, that’s untrue. You can come up with a lot of neat beats on the toms. Take a look at the provided sheet music. You can see exercise one, my right hand is on the floor tom playing straight eighth notes. Then my left hand is on the snare drum on beats two and four and the A of two and the A of four. This is the same beat as we play it in one of the previous lessons when I was just playing my right hand on the hi-hat, left hand on the snare. So all I’m doing is moving that to different voices with my right hand in the low tom and my left hand going between the snare drum and the high tom.
[Demo]
Exercise two is one of my favorite tom beats. It’s just simple 16th notes around the drums. Now, I’ve simplified it a little bit for you here but once you get comfortable with it, feel free to add some hi-hat with the foot or some added bass drum stuff.
[Demo]
Number three is a little bit more complex. You can see on beat one, I have a dotted eighth note. Now, this is worth three 16th notes so the second note on the high tom comes on the A of four. So it starts one E and A two. Just make sure you start this slow and count it out loud to make sure you’re playing it correctly.
[Demo]
Exercise four is a little bit more difficult. As I’m playing straight 16th notes with my right hand on the floor tom then I’m inserting 32nd notes with my left hand on the high tom and the mid tom. For this exercise, I slowed down my metronome to 90 beats per minute so you could hear all those notes subdivisions.
[Demo]
Now, you might not want to use exercise five as a groove for a whole song. It would be a good idea to use it for a bridge or maybe just a short four bar phrase. It’s a straight single stroke rule, right-left, right-left and then on the two E and A I go to snare on the two E and A. So, my left hand hits the low tom and comes underneath my right hand. The same thing happens on beat four. So, watch as I demonstrate and then you can take it to your kit.
[Demo]
Now, there are millions of different combinations of tom beats. I’ve written out five of them to give you some ideas. Once you’ve mastered this, you can come up with some of your own.
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