Drum & rhythm technique

The Lounge
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I’ve got OK rhythm but have never learned to play drums and always felt a bit bad about it. I do work hard on beat programming and rhythmic theory and trying to think about how real drummers approach things. Inevitably this leads to watching drum instructional videos on youtube every so often but I find most videos instantly forgettable once I’ve grasped the theory or technique.

But by chance this evening I came across a video of Stewart Copeland (from The Police) on how he drums which just blew me away. It helps that I enjoy The Police and was amused by the side stories about how the band interacted on stage or what they would fight about in the studio, but mainly I was blown away by the way he pulled together random things in music history or theory and then showed how they manifest in actual tracks. Also although he barely talked about physical technique (since the video is aimed at experienced drummer) I found it a fantastic insight into dynamics and how to balance the expressive possibilities of a big drum kit. I learned more about drumming from this hour-long video than from the last 50 I watched before that. It helps that he’s extremely funny.

Feel free to share your drum/rhythm insights or other great resources you’ve stumbled across!

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I’ve been taking group drum kit classes and it’s had a giant impact on not just playing, but programming and appreciating drums. Would hugely recommend.

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How do those start out?

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Doing the drum kit programme at Morley College here in London. We started with a standard 2 and 4 snare, 1 and 3 kick and quaver high hats and then did kick drum phrasing placing extra kick drums. Then did semi quaver high hats and the same sort of thing, triplets, shuffles, and then started not just doubling but displacing the kick and snares. We’ve just moved to doing dynamics to make those extra snares into proper ghost notes.

At first I was a total coordination mess and counting is a lot harder than it seems it should be. Your limbs all doing different things but it’s starting to click into place that they’re all the same thing and the displacement phrasing stuff is basically the backbone of everything musical on the drums.

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I remember watching this video and was damn this guy explain that very well… At first I was searching for Odd Time Signatures, Polymeters, Polyrhythm because I do AfroHouse and it’s a very interesting subject not only for percussions (it’s usually the first thoughts coming in head)…

Later on my search i found some really cool music books… on rhythm in west African music.

And this playlist from PianoPurposePeace is incredible to understand most of the concepts

Nowadays I train myself with PolyRhythm Metronome apps and that’s great…
Also there’s some cool stuff from the other way around I would say like “Fugue” (there’s an app called Fugue which is awesome), Ostinato, Arpeggio that can be applied to rhythm just like polyrhythm can be applied to any musical and bass phrases.

And I records most of the percussions i can… but some are really difficult to find, or are very expensive… like I dream about a Conga set but I don’t really have the space for it… and I didn’t really like the sounds of the new small voyage set that sell like crazy these days…

I’m looking for a Yoruba set lately… (I should get it very soon)

If people reading my post are interested to know more and listen try Ben Aylon, called also onemantribe he have a lot more than me and do sample and loops…

That’s very cool to understand all that even when doing mostly 4-4 music. Like shuffle hihats, understand how the groove pool works… even how the new midi generators in Ableton works… as there’s a lot of them that are based on all of those concepts.

And FILLS are absolutely underrated in arrangement (constructing a song) we all first think to well I will have to automate stuff… and completely forget the one shot events in a track is very important… to wake up people mind…

i also love Batucada but that’s a band or ensemble story then.

For those who want top learn the basics on some of the most popular percussions :
Cajon

Bongo
Djembe
Conga
Darbuka
Timbales
Tambora
Pandeiro

I can’t recommend enough the series “your first xxx Groove with” Carles Planells and also Willie Garza

https://www.udemy.com/user/carles-planells/

https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-to-play-conga-drums-tone-fundamentals-basic-rhythms/#instructor-1

Those basics are really cool and I find her full channel a great source of learnings :

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