Drum Related

People often hear about “rock kits” or “fusion kits” but few new drummers actually know what the difference is. So here you go….

A “rock” kit is a drum kit characterised by toms which are larger and deeper than on a “Fusion” kit. For example, a “Rock” kit traditionally consists of 12″, 13″ and 16″ toms and a base drum size of 24”

A “fusion” kit is a drum kit characterised by toms which are smaller and shallower than a standard “Rock” kit. For example, a fusion kit may consist of 10″, 12″ and 14″ toms, and a base drum of 22”

“Four to the Floor” is a groove (rhythm or beat) that contains a bass drum playing all the ¼ notes (i.e. the “1” “2” “3” “4”).

The snare drum pretty much always stays on the “2” and “4” like normal, and the hi hat is usually the biggest variant.

Four to the floor is very common in dance music as it maintains a constant pulse or beat for people to keep dancing to.

The most common mistake when playing four to the floor is to “flam” some of the sounds (to play them slightly out of sync). This gives and un-tidy and not really very “danceable” kinda groove!

I personally think that a good four to the floor groove is the mark of a good drummer. Any drummer that can kick a good four to the floor groove throughout a track and make the instrument sing is a very good musician and although doing something seemingly simple, deserves his dues!

We’ve all heard of an accent, but for most of us it’s something we talk in that makes us different from someone else.

An accent in the world of drums works much in the same way. An accent is an emphasis of a note, for example, playing it louder. Accents work best when accompanied by a ghost note.

A ghost note is basically the opposite of an accent. It’s something that doesn’t stand out. A ghost note is supposed to be quite, this in turn makes the accent stand out even more.

To get a real good texture one may need to work on the quality of their accents and ghost notes. My ideal is to have the accent at 80-90% vol and the ghost note between 5-15% vol when slow so that when sped up they become 70% to 25% in ratio.

It’s actually more important to work on the ghost note to get a good accent. I know that sounds counterproductive, but the accent is the easy bit, trust me!

I use this analogy for people when explaining accents and ghost notes:

A guy who’s 7ft tall, in a room full of guys who are 6ft 9 tall doesn’t really stand out all that much. But take a guy who’s 6ft and put him in a room full of dwarfs and he sticks out like a sore thumb!

It’s not about making the accent LOUD, it’s about making the ghost note quiet

Something very simple for you tonight.

Down beat = the “1” of the bar.

Up beat = the “2” of the bar

Back beat = the “2” and “4” of the bar.

See, told you it was simple!

Interestingly enough I’d never heard of a “snake pit” in a musical sense until last weeks gig. It turns out a snake pit is a slang term for a stage box. For those of you who are still none the wiser, a stage box is a box that you use up on stage into which you plug your various leads (like an XLR or Jack). From the stage box you then have just one big fat, but neat, cable running into the mixing desk. They save having a whole bunch of separate cables running all over the place and getting in people’s way.
So there you go, a “snake pit” is another name for a stage box! 

I’ve been visiting quite a lot of schools recently, drumming up (sorry, couldn’t help it!) some new business, and I’ve been asking all the kids if they knew what a “Genre” was. None of them could tell me! I was rather disappointed. I mean, what are these kids being taught now days?
So if you too don’t know what a genre is, allow me to educate you…

A genre is simply “a style of music”. For example, Jazz, Rock or Pop. These are all genres.

Now, what I’d like you to is try and list at least 10 different genres and try to make them all pretty different. For example don’t write down:

1. Rock
2. Pop Rock
3. Classic Rock
4. Funky Rock

And so on!

Then when you’ve written down as many as you can think of highlight the text below, copy it to a word document (or something of that nature) and make it all bigger so you can read it to see how many – if any - you missed.

A lot of people struggle to find even 10 different styles!

Then in the coming weeks I’m gonna list the trade marks of these different genres so that you can identify how best to go about playing them.

1. Rock
2. Pop
3. Funk
4. RnB
5. Hip Hop
6. Garage
7. Jungle
8. Drum n Bass
9. Dance (this covers things like House, Acid House and Trance and so on….)
10. Heavy Metal
11. Shuffle
12. Swing
13. Jazz
14. (I could now list “Big Band” but that’s really a mixture of the above three!)
15. Blues
16. Gospel
17. Reggae
18. Indie
19. Dance Hall Reggae
20. Classical (though kinda hard to do with just a drum kit!)
21. Punk
22. Rockabilly
23. Country
24. Ballad (and power ballad!)
25. Fusion
26. Christmas songs!
27. Afro Cuban (Latin music)
28. Electro
29. Bangra (Indian music)
30. Brit Pop

I’ve previously mentioned an “Intro” which is short for the word “introduction” and the opposite to an intro, in a slang musical term, is an “Outro”. However there is no such word as “Outroduction” before you get on my case!
Very simply, an outro MUST be at the end of a track. It can’t be anywhere else, and therefore there’s only ever one of them. Sometimes you’ll just here a chorus to fade, which means you just repeat the chorus while getting quieter. However an outro is something that is different at the end, something that specifically takes you to the end of the track. Sometimes and outro will fade while other times it will have a definite stop. Have a listen to a few tracks to spot the difference between a specific outro and a repeated chorus.

Now for some reason a lot of drummers refuse to learn to read music and personally I don’t understand this! I think you should at least strive to UNDERSTAND what’s been written, even if you aren’t a fantastic sight reader. But anyway, when it comes to reading, I’ve found that a lot of musicians in general don’t actually fully understand, or at least can’t explain, what a time signature is!

For those who don’t know the time signature is the two numbers (one above the other) at the start of the bar or page. For example:

4
4

I’ve found that many people don’t actually know what the two numbers represent! So I’m gonna tell ya as it’s very simple.

The TOP number is the answer to the question…… How many?
The BOTTOM number is the answer to the question…… Of what?

So…
How many? Answer = 4
Of What? Answer = ¼ notes. (4 stands for ¼’s…. 8 stands for 8ths ….. 16 stands for 16ths)

It’s that easy! Now the top number can basically be anything, but the bottom number is pretty much only ever 4 or 8 which means ¼’s or 8ths. Only once in a blue moon will you see 16 as the bottom number.

All the time signature tells you is how many of a certain type of note you have in your bar. This then gives you the info you need to figure out what you need to count. It DOESN’T tell you how long your bar is, as you have to factor in speed, but at least you know which number you need to count up to. Remember, when the time signature changes out of 4/4 you must compare the notes to each other and not the bar. So a ¼ note is not worth a ¼ of a bar of 3/4. It’s still a ¼ note compare to other notes, but not to the bar. It’s only a ¼ note in terms of BAR value in a bar of 4/4.

Now I’m sure some of you are really confused at this point, which is fine. But I urge you to re-read this page until you fully understand it as I’m sure it will come in handy at some point!

I will tell you one final thing about time signatures:

C = common time = 4/4   

This particular part of the song sounds rather self explanatory, and it is really! An intro is simply something that introduces the main body of the song. (In case anyone didn’t know, “intro” is short for INTROduction!)
However, make sure you don’t get an intro confused with a 1st verse of something to that effect. An intro usually has very few or no lyrics. Sometimes it may be and instrumental chorus or something too. Intro’s can quite often be rather short and snappy, or simply a fill to pick the track up. The trade marks of an intro are that it MUST be at the beginning of a song and it happens only once! It may well be that later in the track you here something you heard at the beginning, however you can’t call that an intro too! So don’t make that mistake. Intro’s are pretty easily identified though, so I’m sure you’ll all get this one right.

I’m sure there are quite a few drummers out there who haven’t heard the term “sub-division” before. This is because people rarely know that they know about them!

A sub-division is simply a division of a SECTION of your bar. So a bar of 4/4 for example, has four sections, a sub-division is when you divide one of these sections again. (Hence the “sub” part)

A few rules about sub-divisions:

1) They MUST be EVEN!!
2) They must be a division of a SECTION, not of the bar!!

You already know some sub-divisions, but you may not know it yet. So here they are:

Sub-division of….   Note type….

1                                ¼
2                               8th
3                               8th note triplets
4                               16ths
5                               Quintuplets
6                               16th note triplets or Sextuplets
7                               Septuplets
8                               32nds

You can go higher, but for the most part you’ll only need up to 8. Also, it’s worth noting that you barely ever hear a sub-div of 5 or 7 as they sound kinda weird!

When I eventually get my arse into gear I’m adding a simple sub-division exercise (in a video format) to the site so if you’re still unsure as to what I mean you can have a watch of that and maybe it’ll all become clear!