Rhythm Section Drumming

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource for improving your drumming
Review: If you are a beginner to average drummer, but serious about improving your drumming ability, then this book will be the best help you can find.

I have bought a few drum rhythm books, but this one is different. It is full of rhythms that are like rungs on a ladder - each one is just a little higher/more difficult than the last. By working through the book in a systematic manner, you will find that your drumming ability is taken to new heights that you did not think possible, and in the shortest possible time. And you don't need a lot of equipment - a snare, kick drum and hi-hat will do for most rhythms (though a ride would also be helpful).

To get the best out of the book, and maximise my own learning, I began using it 'systematically' about 5 months ago. I had bought it 4 months before that, when I was learning at about grade 3 standard, on the recommendation of my drum tutor (all credit to Julian, therefore), but had worked through the rhythms in an ad hoc or casual manner.

Most pages contain between 6 and 12 rhythms, each with increasing difficulty. I start to learn each rhythm at a slow pace (I have a Korg MA-30 metronome, bought for less than £20 from www.adcdrums.co.uk, plugged in to a combi amp using a small-to-large-jack lead). I practice each exercise using three positions: open-handed on hi-hat, cross-handed on hi-hat, and ride (not the book's recommended method of learning, but an approach picked up from my drum tutor). I mark, above the rhythm, the bpm that I have achieved, and then go on to the next one. Once I have finished the page, I then go back to the first rhythm on the page, crank up the metronome in 10bpm jumps (or less, depending on the difficulty of the rhythm) and work through the page again. I keep doing this until I can eventually play all the rhythms at the target pace (the target beats per minute isn't written on each page, unfortunately, but it is on the 'rhythmic summary' pages that follow).

Although I practice on average for 30 minutes a day, I've only completed pages 5 to 18 so far, but my skill and limb-independence has improved very rapidly. I can do the rhythmic summary on page 19, but only at 10bpm less than the target pace. However, I've already learnt that when I'm stuck it is better to move on to the next page - when I come back to the rhythm a few weeks later, having done more advanced rhythms, the rhythm I was stuck on seems much easier to do. Using this approach, I've progressed to page 30 (but with some pages between 19 and 30 falling short of the target pace). However, I'm keen to move on to the Latin rhythms, such as Calypso, Cuban, Merengue, and Mambo, that appear later in the book.

Incidentally, if you buy the book/metronome combination that I have, the Korg MA-30 can't do 12/8 time, which is needed for some rhythms, and a 12/8 metronome is much more expensive. However, the MA-30 can still set the target pace in 4/4 mode - you calculate the bpm required by multiplying the target pace by 2/3rds (for the mathematicians, that is the same as dividing by 12/8 and then multiplying by 4/4).

To put that in plain English, if the target pace is 160bpm in 12/8 time, then set your metronome to 107 bpm in 4/4 time and play triplets. This is because 160 x 2/3 is 107 (approx). I'm glad to report this calculation had my tutor foxed for about 17 seconds!