Jam Babble

While Guitar Players have basic scales to practice, drummers have rudiments to build a solid foundation. What exactly is a rudiment? Why do you need to know rudiments? How the heck do you use them once you know them? Each one of these is a great question, and a question we’ll answer in this article. I’m going to provide an overview of what drum rudiments are, how many there is and what good they are to you, and hopefully after reading this article you’ll be enticed to seek out more information about drum rudiments to improve your durm skills.

How Many Rudiments Are There?

In total there are currently 40 different rudiments recognized by organizations across the world. The list started out with an original 13 rudiments put out by the National Association of Rudimental Drummers. They added an additional 13 rudiments and the Percussive Arts Society later again added another 14 to the list of 26 making the full 40 rudiments we recognize today.

At their most basic level rudiments are the basic patterns played on a drum kit or practice pad to improve stick control, speed and wrist movement. There are more advanced rudiments which require you to play them on your full kit and you’ll begin to recognize that these patterns are the building blocks of many drum patterns and beats in popular music today

Ideally a beginner should start with the practice pad before moving over to their full drum kit. This ensure that the technique is at the forefront when learning each pattern and speed and sound are secondary.

What’s the importance of learning Rudiments?

A good analogy of learning drum rudiments is a professional hockey player who hits the gym every day. While there spot is hockey they still spend hours doing weight lifting, resistance and cardiovascular training which helps them with speed, endurance and strength when playing their primary sport.

The above analogy holds true for rudiments and drummers. Learning, practicing and mastering all 40 rudiments provides you with superb stick control, wrist strength and speed. These skills when done even on a parctice pad transfer over to your drum kit when you’re ready to play. It can be easy to get tied up in the idea of “playing” the drums all the time, but if you don’t put some foundational work in once and while you can fall behind.

Options for Learning Drum Rudiments

There is no shortage of videos available on websites like YouTube that will teach you the 40 Drum Rudiments, of course some of them aren’t always correct or good quality. I believe the best way to master all 40 drum rudiments correctly is to spend some money on a quality drum course which has a focus on proper technique and covers all 40 rudiments in detail.

While most information is available for free learning everything from a professional instructor with the right support materials has it’s advantages and can help you improve your understanding.

Do you know what the second most played and learned instrument is behind the guitar? It’s the piano and the way we learn it is drastically changing these days.

Just as how we converse and interact with others and do our banking is changing thanks to the Internet and other communication advancements these same technologies are changing how we learn as well.

It could be learning the guitar or how to swing your golf club better to break 80 we’ve never had so much knowlege at our finger tips. You can get a piano course for less than $20 bucks a month and teach yourself how to play faster then ever before.

Since it is so easy to find instruction, lessons and videos for just about anything you can think of we’re faced with a multitude of choices which makes learning anything some what difficult.

It used to be if you wanted to improve your golf game then you’d take lessons and practice, practice, practice. Today you can watch some lessons online about how to chip and putt better and then move right along to a video on how to play your first chords on the piano followed by who else knows what.

Our span of attention to things is shrinking and it takes a special type of person who can focus in on a task as hand to get it done. Most of us who want to learn something new fall in love with the idea of it but can rarely, if ever get past that stage because something else catches our attention before we ever get the chance to learn the first thing we were interested in.

So while no ones arguing that shopping online, gaining a connection with old friends and family members sometimes half around the world and in some instances improving productivity in some instances isn’t great there are a slew of other side effects that our instant knowledge world has left us with.

Could it be that we’re breading a society where ADD will become the social epidemic of the next generation?.

Learning Guitar is Becoming Increasingly easier thanks to new technology. It wasn’t all that long ago that kids were going to take guitar lessons after school from an individual, now they’re rushing home and turning on their computer to watch video guitar lessons.

It’s happened quickly but online and dvd video instruction is surpassing private lessons as the preferred method of learning guitar for students both old and young. Why? Well like everything else we’re find it easier and faster to handle this part of our lives with the assistance of computers,and the Internet.

An online guitar course which is done entirely via the Internet and a computer costs far less then private guitar lessons and does not require the student to leave the house. Also since it’s a self study program students can watch lessons and practice when it’s right for them, no schedules..

Another point is that the best guitar lessons online are often taught by teachers who are far more skilled then those you could find locally to teach you guitar as a beginner. So choosing to learn online can be as much about saving money as it is about the speed with which you learn and the quality of the instrument.

How does this shift affect music schools, stores and instuctors?

Enrolment is lower then it used to be at many music stores offering lessons, how ever this is primarily in the mature student market (those over 30 years of age). Younger children and teenagers, or possibly their parents, still seem to be embracing the private lesson model.

There is a group of instructors who have started creating their own lesson videos and either posting them to video websites such as youtube or their own websites and blogs. This offers an additional revenue stream for many of these teachers who may teach guitar full-time. It may be a great business decision for them as they can reach more people online then they possibly could locally and videos can teach more then one person at once.