MOTIVATION

Ever get in a slump and can't get excited about drumming? This is often due to lack of motivation or stimulation. Just as you would read positive books of wisdom and understanding to improve yourself as a person, the same holds true with drumming. You must find ways to be excited about playing. The following offer a few suggestions:

1. Surround yourself with great musicians. When you're around great
players, you will strive to be the best yourself. It rubs off, I promise!

2. Buy a new cymbal, piece of hardware, or drumset. Sure, it's a bit expensive, but it never fails to help get the juices flowing.

3. Listen to great drummers on CD and Video. The more you hear, the
more you will have the desire to play like them.

4. Go to drum clinics! What can I say, if you don't walk away inspired by a great clinic, then you probably shouldn't be playing.

5. Set goals for yourself. No matter how small the goal, it
gives you something to strive for and gives you a sense of purpose in life. Life is more fulfilling when you're moving forward.

6. Take some lessons. Despite your level of experience, lessons always seem to inspire us. You will find new approaches, viewpoints, and techniques that you may have never encountered otherwise. Even the greats will often go back and study with a teacher after a long successful career. They are maintaining goals in their life and assuring continual motivation, excitement, and competitiveness.

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Time Management

Do have trouble finding time to practice?
This famous writing may provide some inspiration.

As this man stood in front of the group of high-powered overachievers, he said, "Okay, time for a quiz." Then he pulled out a one-gallon, wide-mouthed mason jar and set it on a table in front of him. Then he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, "Is this jar full?" Everyone in the class said, "Yes." Then he said, "Really?" He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the spaces between the big rocks.

Then he smiled and asked the group once more, "Is the jar full?" By this time the class was onto him. "Probably not," one of them answered."Good!" he replied. And he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went into all the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked the question, "Is this jar full?"

"No!" the class shouted. Once again he said, "Good!" Then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim. Then he looked up at the class and asked, "What is the point of this illustration?"

One eager beaver raised his hand and said, "The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit some more things into it!" "No," the speaker replied, "that's not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is:
If you don't put the big rocks in first, you'll never get them in at all."


Note: We don't know who the author of this is. If anyone out there can tell us, we would love to give credit where due. - Thanks!

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Basic Drum Set Tuning

Regularly and accurately tuning your drum kit should be a religious maintenance routine. Nothing amplifies the sound of good drummer better than a tightly tuned set of drums, and it can even make the average drummer shine a little brighter. Before you play your first note, taking the time to tune your kit immediately increases your level of performance and commitment to excellence.

As you should already know, a basic drum kit includes a bass drum, cymbal, snare, hi-hats and toms, and it is fairly customary to start by tuning your snare drum. This can be the most precarious drum to tune because the heads are known to bust easily. First, tune the top head. Turn each lug with your drum key clockwise to increase the tension or counter clockwise to release tensions, or lower the pitch. After adjusting one lug, moved to a lug on the opposite side, at 180 degrees from the first one. Then you can move back to the first lug and adjust the lug next to it, continuing on in similar way for the rest of the head. As you adjust ach lug, lightly tapping approximately one inch away from each lug with a drumstick. By making sure each lug is holding the same pitch, your drum will soon be tuned.

Many drummers tackle the toms next. Toms have the most noticeable rendering of pitch, so it is important to do a good job. Start tuning the bottom head of your toms first, using the same time of lug alternating technique. Once the bottom head has equal tension, you can move on to tuning the head, which is how you will adjust the pitch of the overall drum sound. To do this, you will need to know what pitch you are trying to match. You can use a piano, a pitch pipe, or you can even match to your guitarist. Once you know the pitch you want, proceed with adjusting the lugs on the top head until that pitch is obtained. Once you have found the right pitch, you will need to recheck the pitch near each lug, just like the snare drum.

Now you are ready to move on to the bass drum and start by tuning the head. You should not spend too long trying to tune the head, because the head of a bass drum is less of a factor in the sound of the drum. Once the head feels right to you and all the lugs are even, you can tune the back head so to your taste. Tunings for bass drums vary greatly depending on the style of music and the other instruments in your ensemble. So before you begin any of this process, you need to have an idea of the sound you would like to produce and the relative pitches that will help you create that sound. As you increase in skill and taste, you will continue to become more particular about the tuning of your drums.

About the Author: Clint Strait is a third generation owner and assistant manager of the Strait Music, www.straitmusic.com">Austin Music Stores, the best of www.straitmusic.com">drum set stores in Austin TX. For more information please visit

How To Play Drums - Learn To Avoid The Fatal Mistakes in Drumming, That Prevent Drummers From Reach

The problem with many individuals, who want to learn how to play drums, is they do not know where to begin. They are not taking the right approach to learning how to play the drums correctly. Many beginner drummers try to play advance drum patterns before learning the basic principles of what it takes to play drums.

There are two ways to learn to play drums. You can pay a drum instructor to teach you or you can learn to play the drums on your own. Now, before you consider on paying a drum instructor to teach you, you need to understand that it can cost you to $55 per hour per drum session. Another way you can learn to play drums and save money is on your own.

Learning to play drums on your own is not a hard task. The most important factor on learning on your own is to discipline yourself and develop a daily or weekly routine for your drumming. There is a popular saying most people say “What You Put In, Is What You Get!” This is very true. The only way to learn and get better is by practicing.

You’ve probably heard “Practice Makes Perfect”! That is not true. Perfect practices that end with an accomplishment are considered a perfect practice. When practicing on the drums a drummer needs to set mini goals that are reasonable to achieve on what he or she will learn for each practice session. Take your time and focus on what you want to learn first.

Before you even sit on the drums create a schedule on what you want to learn for each practice. Below are some examples to give you an idea what to practice on prior to practicing on drums.

How to hit a cymbal the correct way.

1.) How to maintain tempo.

2.) How to play double strokes.

3.) How to play solos

If you want to learn to play as good as a professional drummer you’re going to have to dedicate more than just a few hours a week. Don’t expect to play like a professional drummer who’s been playing six to seven days a week for the past seventeen years by hardly practicing.

Practicing the drums relates to how a professional athlete prepares his or her day in and day out for the sport they play. There is not much difference between a professional athlete and a drummer when it comes to practicing. You are only as good as what you put in.

When I teach students how to play drums, I strongly recommend for them to learn in steps. Sometimes beginner drummers get overwhelmed when trying to play everything at once without knowing how to play, especially if they decide not to learn drum notation. Below are some helpful tips to begin with to speed up the learning process when practicing drums.

1.) Drumstick - Buy yourself a name brand drumstick like Pro-Mark, Zildjian or Vic Firth. These drumstick are very sturdy, reliable and durable. Don’t settle for cheap drumsticks. They won’t last long and it will cost you a lot in the long run.

2.) How to hold drumstick - This is a very crucial step because you need to find the right grip that enables you to play comfortably, get the right bounce and maximize the performance of the drumstick.

3.) How to start off drumming - Learn to maintain the tempo on the hi-hat with your left or right hand. Start with a basic pattern, keep it simple and don’t get ahead of yourself. While playing the hi-hat integrate the bass drum playing a simple bass drum pattern. Last step while playing hi-hat and bass drum integrate the snare into the drum beat.

Applying the simple steps above helps build self confidence. Once you master a drum beat, then you can incorporate the rest of the drum hardware into your drum beat. Never settle on being average. Always strive to be creative and develop your own style of playing the drums. The more time you dedicate to practicing on the drums will make you much better.

In conclusion, take your time when learning how to play drums. Start off with the basic principles until you have mastered the basics. Once you master the basics then you can gradually work on learning the advance. There are many drummers that have not reached their full potential because they try to learn the advanced drumming first rather than learning the basics.

Ricardo Arbois Jr
http://www.drummingsecretsrevealed.com/

Drums ??

The drum is a member of the percussion group, technically classified as a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with parts of a player's body, or with some sort of implement such as a drumstick, to produce sound. Drums are the world's oldest and most ubiquitous musical instruments, and the basic design has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years.[citation needed] Most drums are considered "untuned instruments", however many modern musicians are beginning to tune drums to songs; Terry Bozzio has constructed a kit using diatonic and chromatically tuned drums. A few such as timpani are always tuned to a certain pitch. Often, several drums are arranged together to create a drum set that can be played by a musician.

The shell almost invariably has a circular opening over which the drumhead is stretched, but the shape of the remainder of the shell varies widely. In the western musical tradition, the most usual shape is a cylinder, although timpani, for example, use bowl-shaped shells. Other shapes include a frame design (tar, Bodhrán), truncated cones (bongo drums, Ashiko), goblet shaped (djembe), and joined truncated cones (talking drum),

Drums with cylindrical shells can be open at one end (as is the case with timbales), or can have two drum heads. Single-headed drums normally consist of a skin or other membrane, called a head, which is stretched over an enclosed space, or over one of the ends of a hollow vessel. Drums with two heads covering both ends of a cylindrical shell often have a small hole somewhat halfway between the two heads; the shell forms a resonating chamber for the resulting sound. Exceptions include the African slit drum, made from a hollowed-out tree trunk, and the Caribbean steel drum, made from a metal barrel. Drums with two heads can also have a set of wires, called snares, held across the bottom head, top head, or both heads, hence the name snare drum.

On modern band and orchestral drums, the drumhead is affixed to a hoop (also called a "rim"), which in turn is held onto the shell by a "counterhoop", which is then held by means of a number of tuning screws called "tension rods" (also known as lugs) placed regularly around the circumference. The head's tension can be adjusted by loosening or tightening the rods. Many such drums have six to ten tension rods. The sound of a drum depends on several variables, including shape, size and thickness of its shell, materials from which the shell was made, type of drumhead used and tension applied to it, position of the drum, location, and the velocity and angle in which it is struck.

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