Lesson video

Hello, my name is Miss Charatan, and I'm super-excited to be teaching today all about how we can play drum beats in popular music.

I'm going to be referring to drum patterns as drum beats throughout this lesson.

Let's get warmed up by using some body percussion before we get on to some drumming with things at home.

Repeat after me.

Let's get started coz we have got lots of rhythms till we get through.

In this lesson you will need the following items of equipment.

So you will need a piece of paper, a pencil or pen or something to write with, as well as something to play.

I will give you some more suggestions about that later, but in case you need to get it right now, you can have some wooden spoons, saucepan, and I'm going to give you some other ideas later.

Baking tray's would also be really good too.

So, pause the video, get those things and come back when you are ready.

Great, let's get started.

So we're going to start off by recapping our knowledge of rhythm notation.

Followed by learning about the parts of a drum kit.

We'll explore different drum patterns in pop music, and we'll learn how to play them at the same time.

And then we're going to share our playing.

Let's begin by recapping our knowledge of rhythm notation.

So let's have a look at this rhythm grid.

The first thing we're going to do is pause the video and clap through the rhythm grid.

You may have done this with Miss.

Al-Hanoush in Unit 1.

If you haven't done it, don't worry.

We're going to work out together.

So, pause the video, resume when you clapped through your rhythm grid to check with me.

Lovely, so let's clap through the four lines, A, B, C and D.

Ready, let's do this together.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four, B, one, two, three, four, C D,.

So there might be some challenging things in there.

So we had on C, you can see those squiggles, those are crotchet rests.

So they're telling you not to play anything in that beat.

And then we've seen the quaver rest before.

Some fantastic rhythmic work there.

Let's now move on to the rest of our lesson.

So we've recapped rhythmic notation, and we're now going to learn about the parts of a drum kit.

So, let's listen to this piece of music.

What is the role of the drum kit here? And for your stretch, how does the drum kit support the music? Okay, so there are lots of different drum beats there.

And this was like a track I created on GarageBand.

So it's not a real ensemble, but the drum kit still has a very important role.

So the drum kit provides a rhythm, and it supports the music by actually giving us a sense of what genre the music is.

And it helps us know what style we are playing in.

It also, when you're playing live, help set the tempo, it helps keep everyone together.

So it's incredibly important, particularly for popular music.

So it's all about the rhythm.

So you may have done the previous unit with Miss Al-Hanoush, who taught you the three main beatboxing sounds, and about how they corresponded to the three most important parts of the drum kit.

So what do you remember about the different parts of the drum kit? I'm going to play you a drum track, to boost your memory.

So what drum sounds, could you hear? There were three main parts that we could hear there.

One was the hi-hat cymbal.

That makes it kind of sound.

Like this, like that.

We also had the snare drum, which makes a harsher sound.

And then we have the bass drum or the kick drum.

And this makes the deepest sound.

Which sounds quite similar on this computer, but in real life, they sound very very different.

So, we have the bass drum or the kick drum, the hi-hat cymbal, and the snare drum.

These are the three most important parts of the drum kit.

Can we remember how we made those sounds beatboxing? So we had the bass drum.

We can pay on our chest, or we could do a sound like that.

A really explosive puh.

Try that now.

You're going to put your hand in front of your mouth, if you're a bit shy, like that.

So that's our bass drum.

Can we copy this beat? Go.

Can we do it with our mouths? Nice.

Second one, our hi-hat cymbal.

It sounds like this or a, let's try that now.

Lovely, and let's now have a look at the snare drum.

So the snare drum is more of a sound.

Its harsher.

The snare drum has metal chains underneath it, which makes a kind of rattly harsh sounds.

It sounds very different to the bass drum or the kick drum.

This is also played with sticks.

I forgot to say that bass drum was played with a pedal.

So, that means you can do lots of things at once, if you have a real drum kit.

We can also use a snare drum, do a clap because that's kind of very different to our bass sound.

Let's have another look at this hi-hat.

So the hi-hat in its entirety, looks like this.

So you can see it's got a pedal at the bottom.

So when a pedal is down, the high highest closed, and when you hit it, it makes a very different sound.

It sounds like this, its very short like that.

An open hi-hat is when you lift the pedal up, as you hit it.

So it sounds much much longer and more resonant because there's more space for it to fight, right? So we can hear the difference on this track here.

Can you hear the open and the closed hi-hat? So I can end there.

So what other sounds can we hear on the drum kit? I'm going to play you a fill, which is a part of the rhythm, the beat that kind of goes between sections, and this is when the drummer is able to show much more off what they can do in the kit.

So they generally don't just use the three main parts here.

They use more.

So I'm going to play this to you now, what other sounds can we hear? So at the end, particularly, there were lots of different sounds.

Let's hear them now.

So, we had a crash cymbal in ball.

We didn't maybe hear this in this particular example, but it sounds like this.

So you definitely heard this earlier on in some drum beats we've heard.

We have got a ride cymbal, which is a bit smaller than the crash cymbal.

A little bit softer.

and often that's happening kind of over some other rhythms. So often, it's not kind of a big crash, like the crash cymbal.

It kind of happens over other things.

And then we've got three Toms. So we've got a floor tom, which is the lowest one, mid tom and we've got high tom.

So you can see it's a huge variety of setups for drums. On the left, we've got a very complicated one.

We don't just have two cymbals, we have many cymbals, including a hi-hat, many many more toms than I told you about.

On the right, you can see, actually, we've only got our three main parts of the drum.

So we've got our bass drum, our snare drum and our hi-hat.

So the hi-hat can still be opened and closed because we've got our pedal down here.

Bu the basics are just these three.

And that means if a drama wants to be portable and only take three things with them, those are the three that they would take.

So let's do a bit of listening.

Which part of the drum kit sounds like this? One more time.

Maybe not.

Oh, so I gave it away.

That is a bass drum, well done if you got that one.

What kind of the drum kit sounds like this? I'm not going to play it again, because it might reveal the answer.

So I hope you're listening.

It is a hi-hat cymbal, well done.

Was it open or closed? If you said closed, you are correct well done.

How about this one.

Slightly harsher.

When we think harsh we think? Snare drum, well done if you got that one correct.

So, what are the three main parts of the drum kit? I'm going to put all the parts in front of you, you need to sort them into two columns, main and extra.

Pause the video do that, resume when you're ready.

So, the main parts were the hi-hat, the snare and the bass and the extra were crash, ride and toms. Well done if you got this correct.

So, we have.

So we have learned about the parts of the drum kit and recapped our knowledge of rhythm notation.

We're now going to explore different drum patterns in pop music and learn how to play it's patterns.

So we're going to do the next two bits simultaneously.

For this part of the lesson, you will need to go and get some things to support you to play these with us.

So I suggest if you don't have a drum at home, you find some kitchen equipment or a bucket, can be very useful.

I would very much recommend you getting two wooden spoons.

Coz they're going to be your drumsticks.

I don't have them sticks at home, so I'm using these.

What else have I got? I have got a small saucepan, would be very handy.

I have got my dog food container.

He has very kindly agreed to let me borrow it.

So please thank him.

So this is quite as big.

I'm want to use this as my bass drum.

So I've got bass drum here, so try and get something nice and big.

Try and get something kind of smaller and metallic.

And you might want to get a variety of other sounds, Coz you can experiment with those later, and try and get some drumsticks.

So like two wooden spoons or sticks or something.

Please ask your parent or carer before you go and do this, because I don't want them to be upset with you raising their kitchen.

So pause the video, go and ask your parent or carer what you can borrow for this part of the lesson, and come back when you're ready.

We're going to start off by learning the rock beat.

We starting with this one because it is one of the most simple beats.

We're going to listen to two versions of rock beats.

We're going to listen to it on its own.

And we're going to listen to it in the context of a song.

So let's first start by listening to the rock beat on its own.

I'd like you to tell me, why is it so simple? How do you know it's simple and are there any parts of the drum that you can actually clap along to.

That's the counting Okay, so you get the idea.

Lets now listen to it in a context of Red Hot Chilli Peppers which were a rock band, or I think they still are rock bands and this is their song "Can't Stop." ♪ Can't stop addicted to the shindig ♪ ♪ Chop top he says I'm going to win big ♪ ♪ Choose not a life of imitation ♪ ♪ Distant cousin to the reservation ♪ So how do we know that this beat is so simple? So we can see below that actually we use mainly one beat notes.

So all of the notes bar one in the bass, last one beat.

So that means it's much more simple because you don't have to play very, very quick patterns.

Let's start by learning this bass part.

We're going to start with body percussion, and then we're going to move on to doing it on our own homemade kit.

So can we try and do the bass part without me teaching it to you? I'm going to count to four, one, two, three, four.

one, two, three, four.

one, two, three, four.

Okay, so we're now going to add this snare in.

When does the snack play in relation to the bass? You're right, it plays when the bass is not playing.

So we have bass hush bass bass hush but now we're going to do, bass, snare, bass, bass.

Excellent, coming now under the hi-hat part.

Let's just do this by itself, first with our mouths like that.

One, two, three, four.

What's different about the hi-hat part to the other parts? If you said it's on every beat, and the other parts are not, you're correct, well done.

So, can we put it all together, just with body percussion.

We ready, one, two, three, four, Tricky.

You might need to pause the video and just try that yourself with body percussion, really really slowly.

I'm now going to move on, to showing you how to play it on a homemade drum kit.

So for your homemade drum kit, you need minimum.

One drum, this is my drum here.

The middle, is going to be my bass and the side is going to be my snare.

So it's a little bit higher.

If you've got a hi-haty kind of sound something metallic, great.

If you don't, you can just use your mouth.

So let's start with the bass and snare part.

For now, I'm going to use two sticks.

One, two, three, four, bass, snare, bass, snare Excellent.

Now, if you're doing it with your mouth, you can kind of be doing it.

That's your kit.

If you've got a hi-hat to do with the other one, you can do it like this.

You do it with one hand and then the other one, you play your hi-hat.

This is challenging.

So you might have some time to practise this.

So watch me do it, and then you can have a go afterwards.

I did that wrong.

Okay, so now is your chance to set up properly, pause the video, practise the beat and resume when you're ready to practise with the track.

So you need to make sure you're quite fluent.

Take three minutes for this.

Do a bit of organising, pause the video and come back when you're ready.

Of course you can rewind and watch the tutorial again.

Great, so let's have a go at now playing along with track.

I'm not going to play with you, because I'm going to end up out of sync with the track and it will be a disaster.

So you will need to hear the counting and come in yourself.

If you can't do all three parts, don't worry.

Just do two or even one it's fine.

Excellent, well done, if you go all the way through to the end.

If you want to practise that again just just rewind it's absolutely fine, but we're going to now move on to the pop beat.

So the pop beat, as you can guess is often found in pop music.

So, people like Britney Spears or Billie Eilish.

Its is often simple and very similar to the rock beat.

So let's listen to it.

And I'd like you to identify what is the same about the pop and the rock beats.

And what is the one thing that's different? So here it is just on the drums. And here it is in Britney Spears', "Baby One More Time." ♪ When I'm not with you ♪ ♪ I lose my mind ♪ ♪ Give me a sign ♪ ♪ Hit me baby one more time ♪ So you might have noticed that the drums were not acoustic.

They were electronic drums, but they were still playing the same drum beat pattern.

So what was different between this and the rock beat? So the hi-hat is different.

So before we just had one beat, now we have quavers.

Let's practise it now.

One, two , three, four.

Excellent.

Let's practise this first, body percussion and then second we do it on our kit again.

So remember, our bass and our snare are exactly the same.

Let's practise it now.

Two, three, four.

Excellent, let's now add in our hi-hat part.

You can maybe end with a crash cymbal at the end.

If you need some more time to practise that, pause the video now and practise with the body percussion.

I'm now going to to show you how to do it on your homemade kit.

So same as before, you can either do it, like that with your mouth, or you can do it with the three different parts on a stick.

Okay, this is a bit more challenging so you need to have a bit more coordination.

If you need to, you could maybe even swap around the parts.

So you've got left-handed for example, you might find it easier on a different setup.

So, same as before, you're going to pause the video to practise the beat on your instrument, and resume when you're ready to play with the track.

Take three minutes.

Lovely, let's now play with the track.

Excellent, well done.

We have learned two beats already and it's challenging, for not a drummer, to be learning this beats basically on your own kit.

So great, great work.

Let's now move on to some slightly harder ones.

So this is called a house beat.

House music is also called EDM.

So Electronic Dance Music.

So we can call this an EDM beat.

So this has a syncopated hi-hat and a bass drum on every single beat.

And it's the foundation for most dance tracks and a lot of the music in the charts at the moment is dancy.

So you'll these beats all around you.

Let's listen to it.

And I'd like you to think about what do I mean by syncopated hi-hat and what I mean by a bass drum on every beat? Here's the beat.

Okay, so that is one version of it.

Another version is when we have a bass drum on every single beat.

So that one had it on every other beat a little bit like the rock beat.

This one and it's more commonly, we have something called a four on the floor but we have a bass drum on every single beat.

Let's listen to this now in a track called "Freed From Desire" by Gala a good nineties tune.

♪ Na na na nanna nana nanana nanana ♪ ♪ Na na na nanna nana nanana na na ♪ ♪ Na na na nanna na ♪ Okay, so this one's more challenging to do because we don't have alternate bass and snare.

So what we'll need to do is use our feet, use our clap, and we need to use our mouths.

So we need to stand up now.

Hopefully you can see me.

So the bass drum needs to be on every single beat.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

Do that with me.

It's quite fast, because dance music is fast.

And now were going to add the snare on beats two and four.

One two three four.

Stop there for a moment, what do we do about this hi-hat? So if I do the hi-hat and the bass, what does syncopated mean? Syncopated means off beat.

So it's not an the main beat, it's on the And of the beat.

So this is why this beat is much more challenging.

So if we put it altogether.

I'm not going to stand up coz you can't see my face, I'm just going to use my feet.

So I start with a bass drum, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, now with my mouth Stop, great.

It's even better if you use your feet, because that really means, that you can get all the parts in at the same time.

So that is your house beat.

Now to try on an instrument.

If you need to have more time to do the body percussion, take more time, that's fine, pause the video now.

Otherwise let's now move on to the real beat.

This is challenging, so you might want to even try and find someone to do this beat with you, because it's hard to do different parts on our own.

Bass drum, let's try this together.

One, two, three, four.

Okay, so to do the snare, you could tap yourself.

You could tap something else, or you could get someone to clap for you.

I'm going to actually go in here, this sticks out a bit more.

And am going to to do the hi-hat with my mouth.

Cause I don't have enough hands or feet to do everything.

So it's going to sound like this.

Dance music it's fast, so you might want to speed up even more.

Are we ready? For example.

Remember a handclap is absolutely okay, particularly for this drumbeat instead of the snare.

it's actually really common to replace the snare drum with a handclap sound.

Its really So the same as before, pause the video to practise the beat on your instrument, take three minutes, resume when you're ready to play with the track.

Remember the track is quite fast.

Okay, are we ready? Excellent, well done for getting through all that.

Okay, so we're not going to explore a slightly more relaxed beat.

It's called a one drop beat and this is commonly used in reggae.

I'm going to pay you an example, and you've also got an example below rhythm in notation.

What do you notice about which beats are strong? Okay, so you may have noticed, that beats two and four are strong.

In the other examples of beats we have learnt such as house, it's not beats two and four it's beat one and three really and one, two, three, and four equally strong with the bass drum on it.

So one drop beats have a stroke emphasis on beat two and four.

They often have a syncopated hi-hat again, like the house beat and has quite light bass in snare.

You don't have this four on the floor feeling, the interest is a little bit more in them working together.

So we can see the scenario of bass and actually playing together.

I'm going to play you slightly more typical reggae beat now from a track, and I want you to listen out there again as to what is the difference between the hi-hat, in this reggae track, compared to the other one we just heard.

So you might remember that we had these skunky chords, these syncopated chords, which we did in lesson two.

You might have remembered all about skunky chords.

These are very much present in this example.

So the hi-hat was a little bit more exciting.

It had shorter note values.

But we still had that real big emphasis on beats two and four.

And it was also a bit slower.

The tempo was slower coz reggae is generally got a slightly slower tempo.

So let's practise now, our body percussion beats.

And then we're going to go on to doing it on our instruments.

So let's say I write down two three four So you can't can't clap and do your chest at the same time.

So what I suggest you do, you could do your thigh and your chest or you can stump your foot and clap, it doesn't really matter.

And then you might thigh and chest.

one, two, three, four one, two three, four.

one, two three, four.

Excellent, let's now do hi-hat.

So can we read this rhythm? Let's just count it first and then we're going to it with our mouths.

One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four So let's try with a mouths.

one and two and three and four and Lovely, what do you notice about the relationship of the snare and the bass and the hi-hat? So the snare and the bass happen after the hi-hat.

So they don't happen really at the same time? Which makes it quite easy to play? Let's try it together.

We'll start with the hi-hat.

one, two, three, four.

Fantastic, if you need more time to practise that, that's absolutely fine.

Just pause the video and go through that again.

I'm now going to show you how to do it on instruments.

So here's my dog food bowl.

So am just going to do my bass and snare as both.

Yeah, but you can always use your mouth for your hi-hat or you can do a different combination depending on what you've got.

So one, two, three, four, I'm just going to break it down to the bass.

One, two, three, four.

Now the hi-hat.

three, four, one, two.

Lovely.

So, same as before, you are going to pause the video to practise the beat on your instruments, then you're going to resume when you're ready to play with the track.

Wonderful, let's play with the reggae backing track, coz that's going to be a bit more real.

So, I'm just going to play it.

I'm not going to count you in.

I'm going to play it and then join in when you are ready.

Thinking about that really slow tempo.

If you can't get all of the parts, just do the snare and the bass on two and four.

Two three Well done, if you want to have more practise time that's fine, rewind the video.

Great job, we've got one final beat to look up.

So here is our trap beat.

So I'm going to play you two examples of a trap beat, they're both a little bit different, but they're still trap beats.

And I'd like you to tell me what you notice about them compared to the other beats, particularly the hi-hat.

Okay, and here is another trap beat.

So what did you notice? So, the beats are much more complex.

So they're multilayered, they have a lot more going on than just the three parts, much more electronic than our previous beats we heard, very dry sounds.

So lots and lots of hi-hats playing very complicated rhythms. So I could not have done Tss all that kind of sound on my mouth.

So that tells me that it's really complicated.

So the beat below, written down on a notation is much more simple.

The trap beat that you had on the YouTube video next to me, is probably more indicative of a normal trap beats.

This is very hard to create on an acoustic kit.

We're going to have a go.

So let's just go with the basic one first.

So.

it's much, much faster.

So we have, let's say I'm going to count to four, can we do the bass and the snare just clap it.

So bass like that's one, two, three, four, Excellent, try again.

One, two, three, four.

Now the hi-hat, it comes in often than the bass, like that, a little bit like the house beat, but much much faster.

Okay, and then there's a beat which isn't on the page.

coz it couldn't fit in, I'm just going to teach it to you now.

So the first bit we've learned is, and then I do my.

again.

Nice and slow.

Now really start from the beginning.

Again, Av done it wrong.

Now faster.

Take a moment to practise that by yourself, resume when you're ready.

Great, now it's time to get creative.

So you're going to create a complex trap hi-hat rhythm.

So that means you're not going to worry about the other part two instruments.

You're actually just going to focus on your hi-hat sounds.

It could be my sauce spoon.

Think about shortening values, exciting rhythms very dry sounds.

like that kind of sound.

So make sure it adds up to four beats, so it might be one, two, three, four, for example.

Experiment with variety of beats, and then you're going to have a go at playing along with the track.

Pause the video now and take five minutes.

Lovely, let's now play along with the track.

As before I'm just going to play it and join in when you can.

Excellent work, you should be really proud of ourselves for learning five whole pop beats.

Let's move on.

You're now going to pause the video to complete your task.

You're going to recap all five drum beats we have learned, and choose your favourites from them.

So choose to play in an ABA structure.

so that means rock first, for example, then pop then rock again.

Can you spot any similarities between these drum beats? Pause the video, take 10 minutes and resume it.

Great, well done, great work.

Let's now go through a checklist, to help you reflect on your practise.

Pause the video, answer these questions and resume when you're ready.

Great, similarities between them, did you notice any? So the hi-hat that syncopated hi-hat was in house and reggae.

We also had very similar bass and snare beat in the rock and pop.

Let's do a quick quiz.

What beat is this and how do you know? Okay, rewind the video if you need to hear it again.

The correct answer is reggae.

And you would have known, because it had a really strong two and four.

How about this one? And the correct is rock.

And you know, because the hi-hat was on every beat.

We didn't have quavers, we had crotchet hi-hats.

How about this one? That is a house beat and you know that because of the syncopated hi-hats.

So finally, we're going to share your playing and I'm going to explain how you can do that now.

You're not going to perform your drumbeat along to the backing track.

So you can choose the drum beat you can play the most fluently, Do a dress rehearsal and practise along with the track and then gather an audience and perform to them.

The backing track is on the worksheet and it will look a little bit like this.

If you're doing something for reggae, you need to find a separate drum bass backing track.

But this spatting track will work very well for pop rock, EDM or trap.

pause the video now, rehearse, perform good luck.

Excellent, work on your performance.

We're now going to finish off by going back to our key question.

How can we perform drum beats in popular music? Pause the video and answer these three questions on paper.

Resume when you're finished.

Well done, lets go through the answers.

Three most important parts, snare, bass drum, hi-hat, Five drum patterns, pop, rock reggae, track, house.

Obviously I can't check you playing the five drum patterns.

That brings us to the end of our lesson.

You did such a great job today, I know it was challenging at times.

Keep on practising those drum patterns, see you next time and don't forget to go and complete the quiz.

Bye.