Drumming – It’s Not THAT Hard… Right?

by Jc Lam

It’s easier than it seems actually, once you get the hang of it. Well, I mean playing the drums that is. Sure, it involves technically more movement of more body parts than any other basic instruments there is (guitar, saxophone, and piano to name a few), and yet, to me at least, basic drumming seems a whole lot simpler than playing those other instruments.

    Just take both your palms and start hitting on your lap while in a seated position, one palm after the other in a fashionably traditional and (hopefully) consistent manner. There you have it! You’re basically playing a simple drum beat. Of course, on a drum, we do it with a pair of drumsticks instead.

    Then again, once you’ve got the basic down, (how to hold the sticks, the positioning of your feet and etc), all that is left to do is regular practices and the technical know-hows.

    Alright, with that in mind, let’s hold that thought and go into some technicality in drumming before we get too far ahead of ourselves. After all, the first thing you do learn about, say, a guitar is about its strings – what they are, what they’re made of, what different sounds they make and so on. So, what about drums?

    Well, the first thing any drum teacher would ask you on your first lesson would be, “do you know what a drum is?” And if your answer is a ‘no’, you’d might as well get your big behind out of the room as quickly as you how should’ve stopped reading this article by now.

   

     I’m just kidding.

    A drum is conventionally any hollow container with its two open ends covered (similar to a water drum). On the percussion, however, a drum is not just that. A standard drum set consists of up to four of those cylindrical drum thingy, each producing different sounds and for different purposes.

    You have the snare drum, the tom-tom, the floor tom, and the kick or more commonly known as the bass drum. The snare generates the high pitch volume while on the contrary, the bass drum produces the low, punchy bass lines. It is usually these two that are coupled together into creating the whole works of a drum beat. The toms are usually for additional fill-ins in a basic drum beat.

    But unlike any other musical instrument, the drums also have, well – let’s just call them accessories. No drum set would be complete without some of these accessories and yet, you can remove or add more of them as you please as well.

    Some of the basic accessories for a drum set are the hi-hat, the ride cymbal and the crash cymbal. As always, they are used in different occasions but it is the hi-hat that is usually paired with the snare and bass drum to further enhance the sound of a beat.

    And now, with these general knowledge of what a drum set really is, you would’ve had taken your first of many steps in learning how to play the drums!

Next week: Finally! Are we learning how to play the drums now?