A blog to help with learning and teaching Drums. Written by Theo Lawrence / TL Music Books.
Start going through the sheet slowly, and work up to being able to practice this sheet all the way through as one exercise.
You might want to brush up the Reading Drum Notation sheet to help with reading this sheet.
Related: 10 Beginners drum fills lasting 1 bar
Related (Premium): Beats and Fills Drum Book – Basic Beginners
Play Right hand on all crotchets (1/4 notes), and Right Left on all of the Quavers (8th Notes) – (opposite for left handers).
Young beginners players could count the crotchets as Tea, and the quavers as “Cof-fee”.
You might want to brush up the Reading Drum Notation sheet to help with reading this sheet.
Related (Premium): Beats and Fills Drum Book – Basic Beginners
There are just two note grouping patterns (if you can count the 1st one), and the whole snare drum piece uses various combinations of these.
Most beginners pick this up quite quickly, and it’s a great way for them to understand the ‘twice as fast’ speed difference between quarter notes and eigth notes (crotchets and quavers). It’s also a good idea to introduce the metronome when it’s sounding good, starting at about 60 or 70 beats per minute and going up to 110 or more.
Related (Premium): The Level 1 book included in the download is slightly harder than this sheet – 10 Snare Drum Pieces – Book 1
A simple shuffled drum groove with a triplet based drum fill on bar 12. Shuffle is another word for Swing.
This can be played at various tempos and is something you could play or improvise around at a blues jam night.
The feet are walking, right, left, right, left, on the bass drum and stepped hi hat all the way though, until the last line, where it’s left foot hi hat on every beat.
Follow the sticking (R L R L) for the hands on the snare drum.
Either play as seperate exercises with a metronome, or as one continuous exercise through the whole sheet, with repeats.
Related: 10 rock and pop drum beats with quarter note stepped hi hats – 4 way co ordination
The open hi hats can be seen in the sheet music where the hi hat has a circle around it.
All the beats have open hi hats on the “and” of the beat (i.e. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +).
These beats are a good introduction to playing open hi hats in general, and particularly good for learning the off best feel. These beats need to be repeated a lot and groove needs to be felt by the drummer. A simple ska type guitar riff accompaniment would be an appropiate jamming style for developing an internal sense of groove. On bass a fun slap and pop bass riff would fit, or else something funky without these techniques.
Related: For more of a challenge, try these: Open Hi Hat Grooves Practice Piece with Fills
This drum grooves sheet is good for learning to improvise in a samba funk style. It was initially written for a drum lesson as a rough guide to the kind of things that could be improvised with during a Grade 8 Rockschool song from the 2006-2012 syllabus (Sampa Samba), but this sort of thing can also be played in other songs of a similar style, or it could just be used as a general practice exercise for a drummer who is at Grade 8 or above.
Playing Tip: The fast 32nd note hi hat notes are played using the double stroke technique.
Right handers should play ‘Right Left Right Left’ in a continuous pattern with the hands. Bring your left arm over to the left so both hands can play on the hi hat comfortably and without crossing the arms. The right hand would play the snare drum.
Left handers: lead with your left hand and the snare will be played with the left hand also.
A bass drum skip beat is where the bass drum is played in between the high hats. The skip beats create syncopation, and is often used in funk drumming.
This sheet has a useful selection of different bass drum skip beat combinations. You could either treat the sheet as a series of 1 line exercises, or as 1 full exercises.
Related: Snare Drum Skip Beats
