How To Play Drums - Your Very First Drum Lesson

Hey everyone, it's Jared here and today I'm going to teach you how to get started on the drums. So maybe you just got your drum set, maybe you want to get a drum set and you're going to kind of check out how to learn, but this is the video that's going to show you how to do that. This is for absolute beginners. Now I want you to stick around to the end of this video as well so you can get a free gift from me. Alright, so let's get started on the kit. Now you have all these different pieces, it could be a little bit confusing when you first get started. So we're just going to focus on three different pieces. We're going to focus on the hi-hats, we're going to focus on the snare drum, and then we're going to focus on the bass drum. Okay, so out of these three pieces we're going to build our first drum beat. So first let's start on the hi-hat. Now when you listen to a song, generally you'll tap your feet, right? So just think of any song, think of your favorite song and start tapping your foot to it. Now most of the time you're tapping on quarter notes, okay? So you're just tapping along with the song. So let's do a slower song maybe, okay? Now for every one of these snaps, we want to hit those hi-hats two times, okay? We want the notes to be evenly spaced. And to make it easy, we can count 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and count with me. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Now this on a piece of sheet music would look like that, okay? So you see all little X's and above each of those X's you'll see 1 and then an and, 2 and 3 and 4 and. Now all we have to do is hit the hi-hat with your lead hand, your main hand, if you're right-handed play with your right hand, if you're left-handed play with your left hand. We're going to hit the hi-hat on all of those X's, okay? Here we go, I'm going to put on a metronome and we're going to play along with it. So now we've got the hi-hat down, just make sure that each of those hits are evenly spaced between each other. So you're not going 1 and, 2 and, 3 and, 4 and. They should all be evenly spaced and in time with the metronome, okay? So 1 and, 2 and, 3 and, 4 and. Now what we're going to do is we're going to add the snare drum on the 2 and the 4. So when you say 2, you hit the snare drum, when you say 4, you hit the snare drum. And that would sound like this. So it's pretty easy, we've got to this point we're playing the hi-hat and the snare drum. So now let's focus on your foot, okay? The foot pedal or the bass drum. And we're not even going to worry about the snare drum, we're just going to play the hi-hat along with the bass drum. The bass drum is going to be played on counts 1 and counts 3. You'll see the sheet music right here on screen. And so all you need to do on those counts is just hit the bass drum right in time with the hi-hat. So that would sound like this. Now once you feel comfortable with that, you put it all together. You'll play the bass drum on counts 1 and counts 3, the snare drum on counts 2 and 4, and then the hi-hat on the 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 end. It's as simple as that. So let's put it all together again at 60 beats per minute. So once you feel comfortable playing it at a nice slow tempo like we were, you can start to speed it up. So we're playing it at 60 beats per minute. Let's try it at 100 beats per minute and hear how it sounds. So there's so many things we can learn in the drums. It's literally endless. This is just something to get you started. You can eventually get into all the different techniques. You can get into all the theory, like really understanding the note value tree and stuff like that. But I really just wanted to give you something to get you hooked because I know if I teach you a beat that's played in thousands or millions of songs, you can at least turn on the radio, you can put in your favorite album, and you can most likely play along with it. So I really hope you enjoyed this lesson. I really hope it's enough to get you started. So now I'd really like to give you the free gift I talked about at the beginning. Basically what I did is I hired a bunch of professional musicians to come in and record a song. Now I'm going to remove the drum part that I put to the song so you can become the drummer. It's so much fun to play along to real music. That's why we play drums, so we can become musicians, we can interact with other people, and I really want to get you to that point where you can play music as soon as possible. That's what we do here at Drumeo. So go ahead, click the link right below this video to download your free gift, and maybe one day I'll see a video of you playing this song up on YouTube. Thank you so much for watching. Like I said, it's Jared from Drumeo. If you ever need anything else, just come to Drumeo.com. We absolutely love playing drums and we love hanging out with drummers. So thanks for watching and I'll see you again very soon.