FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Free Online Snare Drum Lesson

Question:
Does anybody know of any web sites that attempt to give you drum lessons or teach you excercises you can do? I know that's a cheesey way to learn but I'm not very good at teaching myself and I can't afford lessons for a little while here. In specific I think I need to go back and do some work with just a snare, i think when i first started taking lessons my teacher graduated me to a drum set a little early. Don't get me wrong I can play a drum set fine but I figure I could afford to do some advanced work on just a single drum. Also I have alot of problems playing beats where my right arm and right foot don't hit at the same time, it's a coordination problem they just want to both go at the same time. Does anyone know any excercises to help this. I can manage to play some beats but alot of times I just can't get them down

Answer:
There are many good exercises for that. One which I find helps with hand to foot independance, is to play a simple hand to hand triplet on the snare with accent on the 1st note of each triplet, for one bar then move the accent on the second note of each triplet for one bar and then to the last note of each triplet for one more bar, and go back to the begining, all the while keeping the bass drum steady on the quarter notes: Keep all the unaccented notes very low, almost ghosted, and even. You can also play paradiddles on the snare or between the snare and the HH as an ostinato, and play different bass drum patterns with it: use different bass drum patterns and when you get good at it you can introduce different accent patterns in your paradiddle rLrr Lrll rLrr Lrll etc. It's simple but it's another great exercise for hand to foot independance There are some free online lessons on the site. In the next few weeks, we will have our Shopping Cart in place. You'll be able to purchase (for about 1/3 the price of a real in-person private lesson with me) pre-packaged private lessons that are like having a transcript of an in-person private lesson with me. In each package, there will be included a cassette recording of all the written examples in your private lesson package. Soon, we hope to have some play along tunes included so that you can practice using the concepts you learn in the lesson. These lessons will cover every style (including rock, funk, and jazz), snare drum technique, and my concepts on circular motion around the drumkit.