Basic beats

Here's a rare bone for my younger/beginning-er readers. What we have here is a collection of basic "rock" beats- really they're good for many/most varieties of popular music using the drum set. The names I've given them are just for convenience- you can use any of these on any kind of music where this general type of thing is suitable. They're just what I call them.

For clarity, I've also given the snare and bass drum parts without the hihat, along with the combined rhythm of those parts. You don't necessarily need to practice those parts, unless you're having trouble with the complete beat.

Get the pdf.

Kristen's rock micro-syllabus

Here I've written up a thing I've been doing verbally with Kristen, one of my 6th grade students, to acquaint with some of the basic moves in rock-style drumming.

Our method has been to run each measure in a section, memorize them, then run them without stopping from memory, then improvise with them. I've written them mostly in 2/4 to isolate each idea; after the exercises are learned and the transitions are smooth, we begin to count them in 4/4. I've found that putting the snare at the beginning of the pattern can help clarify the coordination, so I've written some of the exercises backwards. We don't include those in our memorizing/improvising routine. Once the fill/SD variations exercises are learned, we practice putting them at the end of one or two 4/4 measures of a basic rock beat.

Get the pdf.

By the way, for more of this sort of thing, at the excellent Bang! the Drum School blog there are a couple of pages of good basic rock beats available. If a few more people will start using the "monster mash" style font on our rock materials, we'll have a bona fide tradition going.