You’ve already finished Camille‘s lesson about the basics of drums? You’ve reached 100% for each practice exercise and you want to go further? Then, you’re ready to play your first rhythms! Get behind your kit and listen to your favorite teacher for a fully practice lesson. A program including 5 videos: sight-reading, cycles, dynamics, accents, offbeat and hi-hat opening! A complete course to start impressing your friends!
Thanks to this course, you will be able to set the tempo and master the main elements of your drums: the snare, the kick and the hi-hat. You will learn to accentuate certain strokes according to your desires, but also (and above all) according to the musical context. You will learn several very basic and effective rhythms ! Drumsticks in hand, you can test your instrument to discover new sounds !
To learn rhythms, the first step is to understand them ! At first, you will learn to sight-read 8 basic rhythms, all in eighth note. You will have to read them, and interpret them. You’ll work with them all lesson long. In the following chapters, you will have to: play them longer, chain them, accentuate them… Simply put: do not be in a hurry! Take the time to assimilate them well! The more time you take to play them perfectly, the easier the next chapters will be !
In the second chapter, you will work on these basic rhythms in a cycle. In other words, the goal will be to keep them going, without stopping you. Every 4 bars, you will change the rhythm. Small subtlety: you have to place a Crash on the first beat of each change. Thanks to this method, you will explode your endurance, your coordination and your concentration! Cycling is very efficient, so don’t hesitate to apply this method to all your workouts!
Then, you will learn to make your groove much more dynamic thanks to the placement of accents on the hi-hat, or the ride. What is an accent? It’s about the intensity you put in a stroke, which will make it seems like it’s played more or less loudly than the ensemble. You will be able to highlight certain shots compared to the rest. This is an essential technique to humanize your groove and to be able to do accompaniment !
Camille will show you in detail how to place your elbow and your wrist, as well as the zone to hit to give accented and unaccented strokes on the cymbals. In this introductory chapter, you will start by accentuating all the beats on the hi-hat or the ride, on all the basic rhythms.
This chapter is the same as the previous one, with one (major!) difference: the accents will be played offbeat! In the same way, you will alternate the accents on the hi-hat and on the ride. This exercise requires a lot of concentration! Do not hesitate to work very slowly at the beginning, to understand the concept of offbeats. Once you have mastered it, you will have passed a milestone in terms of coordination and independence!
In the final chapter on these first rhythms, your will have to master the hi-hat openings to develop your creativity, and increase your possibilities of accentuation. This is a particularly popular and interesting technique to enhance your groove! Camille will give you some advice about the gesture. The practical exercise will consist on opening your hi-hat to beats and / or offbeats. You have to accentuate the basic rhythms seen in chapter 1.
This hands-on introductory course is very important, as it is the mandatory entry point to more advanced techniques. It allows you to gain precision, acquire good foot / hand coordination and master the basic elements of the kit: the hi-hat, the snare and the kick. In the first chapter, you will analyze rhythms that will serve as a basis for the next chapters of the module. It is therefore essential to analyze your performance on these 8 rhythms before anything else! To check that you have mastered them perfectly, you can analyze your timing on Drumstik thanks to the Coach Mode available on the application. The interactive training files are available for each chapter, all you have to do is play over the rhythms to know if you are on time!
Once you hit 100% on the different basic rhythms, you can move on to the next chapters. They allow you to mark the strong / weak beats, to convey messages to the musicians, and to create interesting variations in your own playing! So you can go from a basic pattern to original and dynamic grooves!
Thanks to this course, you will finally be able to start playing your first rhythms on your drums! This is the basis of learning the drums, so it is very important to understand the course well in order to be able to approach the next ones with confidence. To make sure that you have mastered these first rhythms perfectly, do not hesitate to analyze your timing using the coach mode of the Drumstik app! At your drumsticks !