Drums: Expert Guides and Resources

Becoming a great percussionist is more difficult than just hitting drums with sticks. Developing your own fluid and easy style on the drums involves practicing rudiments (sticking pattern exercises) in one of two ways: with a metronome or drumming at various tempos.Tuning your DrumsetRegardless of the size of a drum or what its drum head is made of, the fundamentals of getting a good sound out of a drum are the same.

When someone mentions playing bongos, you probably think of a beatnik poet embellishing his obscure poetry with flourishes on a pair of these little drums. Though this image may seem somewhat ridiculous, the role of the bongos as an instrument of improvisation and accentuation isn't far from true. The bongos hail from Cuba and came into being within the Son style of music in the mid-1800s.

Before the advent of the drum set, drums were played one at a time. Each drummer played one drum, and in order to make bigger and better noise — er, music — more drummers were needed. Then somewhere along the way, innovative drummers started putting groups of drums together and beating them all at once. As shown in Figure 1, today's drumsets consist of the following: Bass drum.

If you're like most musicians, getting great-sounding drum recordings seems like one of the world's great mysteries. You can hear big, fat drums on great albums, but when you try to record your drums, they always end up sounding more like cardboard boxes than drums. Fret not — here are some solutions for you. The room The room influences the drums' sound more than it influences other instruments'.

Playing a percussion instrument is all about rhythm. So if you play the drums, when you get together with other musicians, you need to be able to choose the correct rhythm for each song. If you end up reading music, this task is easy because the style of the music and basic groove pattern are notated on the chart (sheet music), but if you play without music, you have to figure out what to play.

Regardless of the size of a drum or what its drum head is made of, the fundamentals of getting a good sound out of a drum are the same. You need to tune your drum to its sweet spot in order for it to sound its best. The sweet spot is simply the pitch where the drum resonates best. This spot varies from drum to drum based upon size, the construction of the shell, and the type of head that you use.