Okay, so here's the situation. You've been
playing in church for a little while now and you're
totally cool with playing the standard rock beats –
you know – (drum sounds) and it goes with most things…
until that one week where your pastor goes: "I think we need to play that old
hymn." And it's in 3/4 time. Now what do you do?
In this video I will be showing you a super useful beat to play if you're ever
in that kind of a situation. It's my absolute favorite for playing in
3/4 time, especially in a worship setting and I will be trying to explain this in
the next 60 seconds.
Let's go! Most of the time when we play
drum beats, we're playing the backbeats on 2 and 4 on the snare drum. Now in 3/4
time you don't have beat 4 anymore, so if you just cut off that last beat and
repeat the first three your drum beats might sound a little bit
empty and strange. One way to get around this would be to
add another snare hit on count 3 instead which will give you a drumbeat that
sounds like this: … but that's rather straight and it has
that old-timey waltz feel which may not be what you're trying to get at.
A slightly cooler way to do this would be to
syncopate the grooves slightly by taking that first snare hit, and moving it
forward in time by one 16th note. That means you're now
playing the snare on the a of one, as well as count three. With the
bass drum note on one, this is how it would sound: For the song in christ alone I went
ahead and added one more bass drum note on the n of 2.
Here's how it sounds in the context of some music: Well, if you were just looking for a
quick fix to help you play a 3/4 song that you need to figure out, I hope that was useful for you.
Of course all these accents are really
up to personal taste: you can try out putting the snare
backbeat accents on whichever count you want, basically,
but this was just one example that I found to be
a rather versatile beat that is also really easy for the rest of your band to
follow. You can also create different textures
by just moving your right hand to different surfaces; you don't have to
just play on the hi-hat, you can play it on the ride cymbal,
floor tom, or take the whole thing and use it as an accent pattern on the snare.
All of those are methods I used when I was crafting the drum parts for the song
"In Christ Alone", and for the rest of this video I will be going through a slightly
more detailed breakdown of those parts.
If you haven't checked out the drum
playthrough to that song yet I would encourage you to do that
so that you get a better idea of what we're talking about here.
Or if you're just the kind of person that wants to see a song played and not
talked to death about, then please do yourself a favor – just go watch that!
But if you're the kind of person who wants a bit more explanation
then hang in there, getting to it.
This cover was a little bit different
from the usual because for once I was not trying to figure out what
somebody else played on the track. I know, I know, who are you, what have you
done with Christal, is this even the right channel anymore? I came up with these
drum parts specifically just for this collaboration
so I had to be very clear in my mind what I wanted to play for each section
of the song. A handful of you might know that besides
just playing the drums I also dabble in a bit of drawing. One
thing that most artists do before embarking on an elaborate painting or
drawing is to sketch out the rough idea first.
You can do the exact same thing when you're planning out a song by working
out the structure.
This song is fairly simple; it's written
in a hymn style, so there are only four verses and
no choruses or bridges whatsoever. That could be a bit monotonous if we just
sang the same melody four times, so I knew I wanted to have
some instrumental interludes between verses two and three, as well as three
and four, in order to give it a bit of variation
as well as to offer the other instrumentalists a
little bit of a feature moment. The fourth verse could have a repeated last
line for emphasis, there would be an instrumental intro as
well as an outro, and I also just put one extra bar of
space between verse 1 and 2 to give it a little bit of breathing room.
So this is the final bar count and rough structure of the song.
(pause if you need to!) Once you have the whole structure down the next step is to decide on the
overall feel of each individual section before you sit down and try and play it.
Each verse is distinctly in two sections of eight bars each,
and it could be useful to try and change the drum beats a little bit to reflect
changes in the lyrics or the music. Now going back to our painting analogy
for a moment: when a painter is trying to design their image
usually they'll have a certain subject that they want to be the focal point of
that image which they'll probably decide on first before adding
all the rest of the details in the painting that will then draw the viewer's eye towards the main subject.
For this song, when i was
listening through, it was the third verse that stood out to me. The
first two lines of that verse talk about Christ's death and burial,
and the next two lines talk about his glorious resurrection.
So when I was planning the arrangement I knew that I wanted that to be the impact
point of the whole song and we designed it such that there was a
modulation or a raise in key at that point.
Once you know that that's the climax of the song it's a lot easier to kind of
reverse engineer and figure out how you want to
build the song to get to that point. Here's how my second level of planning
worked out. (pause here if needed!) One key thing to note is that each of
these sections is actually based around the exact same rhythmic backbone that I
introduced in the very beginning of this video.
They're all based around that same kind of anchor pattern and groove.
When you're first learning a lot of beats it can be tempting to want to
change to a different beat in every single section of the song, or
every time you do a drum fill, but…
Resist the temptation. Just remember,
music makes sense because of repetition. That's what makes the song cohesive. We
don't change the melody of a chorus every time we sing it,
so in most cases the drum beat shouldn't change too drastically either. Alright, this is where
it gets a little bit intense. Your last step in creating your parts for the song in 3 4 that you're trying
to play drums to is… actually creating the parts.
Yeah. Everyone's going to do this a little bit differently depending
on the song that you're playing and your own personal style and vocabulary
so for this section of the video we're just going to listen through to the drum
isolated version of the track I played for In Christ Alone together,
and i'll give you a couple comments on how I played it.
Let's have a look. I feel like I'm doing
one of those reaction videos Okay there's nothing too fancy going on
in the intro at all, but when I first started playing
drums in church these kind of sections mystified me, and
the only thing that senior drummers would tell me is
"color on the cymbals!" and i'm like…
Color in the cymbals? With what,
color pencils? That wasn't very helpful. There are basically two things you
want to do: one is keep time for the rest of the band that's playing,
and just add texture which means you're probably going to
want to play lightly, delicately using more of the tips of your sticks
for soft notes and maybe a couple of these cymbal swells,
which are indicated in the score by these two slashes on the stem which is
also a way of showing a drum roll, but in this case we assume
that it means going from soft to loud on the cymbals.
This note over here is a drag which means you play these two grace notes
softly with one hand, and the main note is slightly louder on the other hand, and
that can be really nice texture especially when you play
the main note on the bell of a cymbal.
In the verse I was actually playing
the exact same rhythm that I introduced in the beginning of this
video which is 1 e n a Previously i introduced
it in the context of the kick and snare where it sounded like (kick, snare, kick, snare) but if you play that exact same rhythm
on the floor tom this is how it sounds like. In the second bar I'm just adding one more note on the e of 2 to make it a
two bar phrase, which means it's a two bar pattern that I'm repeating,
and over here at the fourth bar there's just a little bit of a fill which is two
extra notes on the last two 16th note counts. Realize that I played the right cymbal
there on the fifth part of the phrase. That is actually a little trick I use
sometimes to help myself to keep track of where I am in a phrase.
Doing something a bit different at the halfway point just helps your brain to
remember where you are in the song, especially in this case I was actually
playing the track to a click so I didn't have any melody reference
at the point of time of recording.
It can be pretty useful to learn how to
do a small sort of cymbal crescendo, I wouldn't call
it a roll, but an increase in volume from soft to loud
with one hand, so that you can keep the groove going with the other hand
especially if you're playing a tom beat. This is still keeping to a similar
rhythm, but I introduced the mid tom for the first time
to cue a bit of a change. This fill is actually in the seventh bar of the
phrase, and then there's a pullback in bar eight.
You realize that i stopped the left foot momentum over here
so that it's a complete pause in terms of the rhythm and then there's a cymbal
crescendo and we start again in verse two.
Right, if you are not familiar with drum
notation this can look a little bit intimidating
because there's a lot of notes everywhere,
but the main accent pattern is actually exactly the same!
These little arrow signs are accents which indicate that these
are the loud notes and those are actually the same ones that we were
playing earlier. Beat one is still on the bass drum, the a
of one is now on the mid tom (that's the left hand playing the mid tom)
and then our right hand plays the final two accents on the floor tom as well.
We're just adding in the other notes in betwee. How do you know what hand to use and when to play those notes in between?
The answer is: practice your single stroke roll, which is
R L R L R L R L If you can figure out where your
accents fall in that – so in this case we would be
playing something like one e and a two e and a three e
and a – everything else in between those accents is a possibility for you to play
a non-accented note which is what all those other notes on the floor tom are.
I just didn't play all of them because I wanted to leave a little bit of space
here and there, but where exactly you do that is up to personal taste.
Another ride cymbal note in the middle. This part is quite important
because it's the very first time I'm introducing a snare drum note.
Now you only have one chance in a song to give any particular voice, or any particular instrument in your kit
its first appearance and the snare in particular is a very
powerful instrument because that creates the backbeat that we're so
used to. The very first time you play that is
going to create quite a shift in dynamics, so make sure that you don't use
it too early. In this case i kept it to the second
half of verse two and my main shift between the first half
and second half of verse two is instead of playing the accent on beat
three on the floor tom, it's now on the snare. You might notice that I also changed the
sticking pattern. previously I said to use your single strokes
R L R L R L R L but over here once i'm changing the accent on beat 3 to be the snare, if I
did that, I would be having this strange crossover
thing happening on the snare.
Now I don't want that so what I did was
I used the paradiddle. Beat 2 is actually R L R R which frees up my left hand to play my snare backbeat, and then I
play another R R L at the end to bring it back to the floor tom on
beat 1 for the next bar, so the sticking for that phrase would actually be
something like this where we have half a paradiddle on
beat two and half of an inverted paradiddle – L R R L – on beat three just so that it's easier to orchestrate
this pattern with the snare backbeat. This interlude is the first time we
actually see that original beat that I introduced being
played more or less in its full glory, but
there's a couple extra things. These tiny little snare notes – you can
see they're a bit smaller than the main snare notes on the a of
one as well as beat three, these are called ghost notes, and the one
with a slash through it is basically playing that note as a
double stroke.
You can hear that these ghost notes
mainly happen in between my right hand notes and over here I also played three
right hand notes just to keep the sixteenth note momentum going. I did specify there if you've noticed
that there's no backbeat in this fill because it's leading to a pullback.
The next section is actually the quiet part of verse 3. This is where we talked
about Christ's death, and now with this cymbal crescendo there
will be a modulation in key And this is the epic fill section
which is the whole resurrection bit,
and this is the contrast that we were trying to create as the
highlight of the song. Now another thing I struggled with besides the
"cymbal coloring" was creating epic fills. When I first
started I didn't really know how to do that but there's a
few key principles. One is to space out your notes, because
playing your notes too densely does not add to that grand feel.
Another one is to play more flams. Flam are when you hit with
both sticks together, one softer and before the other; second
one's a bit louder, and that just gives you a more open and
grand feel.
The other tip is to play more bass drum
notes in between your fills as well. When i first started out I played a lot
of fills only on the hands and they just sounded really weak and thin. so
playing with more kick drum notes helps to create more of that
epic feel as well and of course just listen to
more songs with fills that you like and they will get into
your vocabulary eventually. Over here we just have an
epic build up going from a start on the crash and snare,
which will be loud, and then doing another crescendo in 16th notes
especially with the snare and floor tom together, and just to give
the rest of the band more of an idea where to stop I have a
flam on the n of 3 which will give a bit of a cue as to when to come in on beat 1
after that.
Right, this is another time where we have
a new texture introduced, which is the open hi-hat.
This is the first time we're using the open hi-hat so again it
brings that lift to the second half of verse three. There's some slight
modifications in the kick drum groove but you realize that those
variations only happen every other bar. For most of them I'm still
staying to the (original beat) as your basic rhythmic structure and
this part where it says accent with vocal melody is actually referring to
the crashes on the three, n of 3 as well as beat one over here.
If you
listen to the song that goes together with what the vocalist is singing. One small thing in the fill I did over
here, just to make sure that there was more of a build in the last
two bars I kind of added another snare back beat on
two just to give it a more driving feel. Adding downbeat snares tends to give you
that building up effect and it also changes the vibe, because previously
we were playing the accent on the a of one so little shifts like that,
changes to your normal structure will give a bit of a
tension effect and then you can have the release after that. This is probably the most different beat
I played in this song but our skeleton rhythm is still in
there somewhere! originally it was 1 a n 3 where it's kick snare kick snare, in this case it became more like kick kick snare snare and I added quite a lot of extra kick
drum notes so it's (drum sounds!) but I didn't remove any of the original
notes from the original beat (1 a n 3) In that interlude you realize I also
crashed a little bit more frequently.
Inthe previous sections i was being very
mindful not to go overboard on the crashes.
That last fill is quite a unique one (drum sounds) This one is going to re-occur
in the later parts of this song so remember how that sounds!
In verse 4 we're starting with this marching beat, it's purely on the snare.
Again it's still the same basic rhythmic pattern – in fact this is very similar to our original beat, but our snare notes are now played with
flams and it's just surrounded by a single stroke roll sticking. So this is
right left right left flam right left right left right
flam left and the last two right left notes
are double strokes. So that would be something like this: That's the whole verse four rhythm
basically. Another dramatic build up.
Second half of verse 4 is very similar to the interlude, there's just this kind
of extra crash and snare together thing happening which
is just a way to emphasize the backbeat. Remember what I said about playing the
snare on the downbeats to emphasize the build up? Here we have another one!
I'm playing the snare on 2 and then 3 and then 1
and then 2 and then the n of 2 so it's a whole lot of this downbeat-oriented
snare which really helps to build up
towards the next section.
Yes I didn't mention about that flam
across two surfaces over here on the n of 3. When I first
started I had no idea that you could play a flam on two surfaces but it
actually creates an even more open and grand
effect so experiment with playing your flams
across two drums if you haven't, it's really useful. Right, and that was the end! The outro was
pretty similar to the first interlude, nothing too different at all. When you're
ending a song you probably don't want to add any new ideas to it so I kept it
fairly simple.
You might notice that this fill sounds
very similar to one or two of the other fills we played
earlier in the later sections of the song. It's really useful to practice fills
that sound similar to each other and just… don't be afraid to use the same
fill multiple times in the same song. If anything it makes it
sound like it belongs to the same song and not a bunch of
different songs mashed together. One last fun fact for you guys!
The ending of the song, where I played the floor tom on 1 and then the crash
on 2, was actually a complete mistake.
When I was recording the demo version of
this with Daniel he botched the last chord for some
reason – he kind of just muted that immediately
and then played the proper chord on count two. I'm sorry
to reveal that Dan. But it turned out kind of nice and I liked
it, and then we kept that and used it for the actual song.
So the moral of the story is: don't be afraid to make mistakes.
Sometimes mistakes can turn out sounding cooler than you
intended, just make sure that it's actually something that sounds good in
the context of the music that you're trying to create.
And that brings us to the end of this video! It wasn't anything terribly
in-depth but i hope that gave you some ideas about how to create your own drum
parts for the song you're trying to write or a song that you need to play,
and if there's anything that you would like me to break down further just let
me know if not I will (make awkward face yes) hmm.
i guess.
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