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If you've ever looked at a piece of written music be it percussion or melodic (i.e. Piano, Guitar) , you'll appreciate there's a great deal of information being presented to you all at once. It can be quiet daunting at first glance. So knowing this, we are going to simplify it greatly, by taking a 'need to know only' approach. Once we get going we can always fill in the gaps later, but for now, we just want to get reading and playing ASAP. Hopefully, the following helps you get a basic understanding of how to read and play, the exercises on this site.
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R e a d i n g T h e N o t e s:
Each sound on your drum set has it's equivalent representation in music / drum notation. So firstly, to play the exercises we need to be able to identify which written notes, are equal what sounds on our drums. These notes are read across the page, from left to right also. To simplify the problem further, we'll only work on identifying three notes, The Hi Hat, The Snare Drum and The Bass Drum, which are really the primary sounds anyway. It should be noted, that despite various efforts to 'standardize' drum music, their are actually differences that exist between country to country, and teacher to teacher for that matter, but to be honest, if you can read one style, you can read the others.. Now, lets introduce our first musical term. "The Staff" (also known as, or pronounced as "Stave"). The Staff is made up of 5 evenly spaced parallel lines running across the page. e.g.
You'll notice there's a box shaped symbol on the left hand side of the staff, this symbol is used to represent that this staff or piece of written music, is for a percussion / drum instrument, the symbol itself is called a clef. There are a number of different clef's, you might be more familiar with Treble and Bass Clefs, which are commonly used for Piano, Guitar, Bass Guitar and Voice.
So lets assume that each staff line represents a unique sound on the drum set. Commonly, percussion music for drum set, uses the following lines as standard definitions. e.g. #2
Thus any note drawn on these lines is either a Hi Hat, Snare or Bass Drum sound, it's that simple. .
e.g. #3 In e.g. #3 we can see actual notes drawn on the staff, it's worth mentioning that notes written on the Hi Hat line are normally represented with an 'X' symbol rather than a dot symbol, which is used for the snare, bass drum and tom toms. Also, notes can be combined (played together), if they lined up directly above one another. e.g. #4 Note 1 Note 2 Note 3 Note 4
In example #4, we can see that there are a number of possible note combinations. Note 1: ='s Hi Hat and Bass Drum together Note 2: ='s Hi Hat and Snare together Note 3: ='s Snare and Hi Hat together Note 4: ='s Hi Hat, Snare and Bass Drum all together.
T h e M e a s u r e:
Although, identifying which line is equal to what sound is a large part of the battle, the real issue is understanding the timing that those notes are to be played. This can be a big issue, but if we keep it simple and then introduce more complex reading issues later on, it shouldn't be such a problem. Before we talk about note durations, we'll introduce our next musical term the "Measure" ( known as a Bar also), a measure is nothing more than a small segment music, out of a larger piece of music. By breaking music up into measures, it allows us manage songs as a series of smaller components. This allows for easy repetition of individual measures or even a collection of measures. (for example, It allows you to notate, that an entire verse is to be repeated, without you actually having to write out the verse again.) To show us where a measure starts and ends on our music, we'll need to introduce another term, called "Bar Lines", these are drawn vertically on the staff, and define the start and end of each measure.
A Measure is represented on the STAFF as the space between two vertical Bar Lines.
Above is Measure 1 And here is Measure 2
Depending upon who wrote the music, measures can also be numbered, which is normally represented with a number above the top left of each measure, something like this.
1) 2)
This is commonly the case in chamber and orchestral music scores, but it's also used in drum charts too. They give us an easy way to locate any passage of music within a larger piece of music quickly.
T h e N o t e s W i t h i n a M e a s u r e:
There are two types of symbols that a measure can contain any number of combinations of, these are NOTES and RESTS. NOTES are the symbols that represent playing (hitting a drum) an actual sound on the drum set, While RESTS on the other hand, are symbols used to show a period of silence, thus they are deliberately left out. Rests are needed to maintain the spacing of our music.. So to avoid confusing the issue here, we'll firstly talk about Note symbols and ignore Rests for the moment.
Each measure of music is broken up into smaller evenly spaced parts called Beats, in the following examples we'll assume that each measure is made up of 4 of these beats. This isn't always the case, but for now this assumption will suit our needs perfectly.
T H E Q U A R T E R N O TE
The first NOTE value, we'll look at are Quarter Notes (Crochet) symbol. Quarter notes are represented on the music as notes that have only a steam, and in the case of our examples are equal in duration to one beat. thus there are 4 quarter notes per measure. Quarter Note Example. (also known as crochets)
Please Note: It's important to understand that it doesn't matter if the steam goes up or down, as either way and the note would still be considered a Quarter Note
To help us during our development, it's common to actually count aloud each beat while practicing, this helps develop a better sense or feel for the time and furthers your ability to do more than one thing at once, which is a big requirement of playing the drums.
So, once we add the counting we end up with the following.
1 2 3 4
T H E E I G H T H N O T E
The next note value is called the Eighth Note (or quaver) symbol, they are represented on the staff as note that have steams that are joined together with a single horizontal line.
Here are some example of eighth notes.
Each eighth note is equal to HALF the length of a QUARTER note, so each quarter note, can be broken into two eighth notes. To help us identify Eighth Notes they have a particular way of counting.
Here are some example of eight notes with their counting written above.
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
Sorry This is TO BE COMPLETED.....
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