Sounds of the Tribe

..:: Genres of Drumming ::..

The second most popular instrument around the world after the human voice is the drums or the percussion family. With this comes a great array of styles or genres of drumming. Listed below are just a few styles of drumming you can find, and are taught by the Drum Lab.

Rock is the most popular style of drumming in western culture and is fairly easy to understand as we here it everyday. The purpose of the rock drummer is to keep a basic tempo for the song and normally just requires a four/four rock beat. Normally the instrumentation that is needed for rock music is just a hi-hat, snare, bass drum, a crash cymbal and a tom or two for fills. The hi-hat typically keeps straight eighth notes, the bass drum on 1 and 3; and the snare is on 2 and 4. In many rock songs it's difficult to improvise and solos are quite rare during an actual song, however many solos can be played at live performances, for example the punk/rock outfit Blink 182. There are many great rock bands some include Led Zepplin, Grinspoon, The Beatles and Jet.

Jazz too many new drummers tends to be a lost trend in the 1950's, however the world's best drummers are jazz drummers. It is a unique style and has lots of soloing for drums. Jazz music swings and requires a different tempo keeper. That means that you play swung eighth notes, which means the eighth note is a dotted eighth note and the second note is a sixteenth note.

Jazz, unlike rock has much room for improvisation. You can play what ever you feel as long as it is in the style of the music piece. There are many sub-genres of jazz and they can require different mediums like congos for example. Jazz is also a great style to learn for gigs as restaurants don't want a loud heavy rock band playing while people are having dinner, they want light background music played by a jazz band.

Funk is a great style to learn and is part of the rock genre. Funk usually has sixteenth notes on the hi-hat with variations on the snare and bass drum. It is hard to teach difficult funk as it normally comes by listening to funk and practising it regularly.

When playing sixteenth notes on the hi-hat many funk drummers use their left and right hand on the hi-hat to make the tempo fast. Funk is used a lot in night clubs and to dancing music.

R&B/Rap/Pop is the new age of music for many teens, but very un-favored by a lot of drummers as a lot of the music is played by drum machines making the use of drummers obsolete. Rap normally has a wider variation on the bass drum playing unusual 16th note rhythms. It tends to have straight eighth notes on the hi-hat like a rock beat. With R&B and Pop this bass drum variation is maintained but with R&B and Pop there tends to be the use of independence, that is using the hi-hat pedal on the 1, 2, 3, 4, to cause a kind of disco, dance feel to the music.

I use the term traditional and cultural when I decribe music from other cultures, countries and societies. This style is not native to western cultures and is rarely played at concerts or gigs as such. Some examples of this are Latin and Samba. Latin tends to be a little heavier than samba. Latin and Samba both have straight beats with variations on the ride or cowbell. You don't just play plain eighth notes on the ride you create a rhythm. These cultural rhythms tend to be very fast in tempo.

Brazil (South America) is a great country to explore and experience cultural drumming. Cultural music is great for improvisation and you can use claves and songos to jazz it up. Cultural music is great for achieving left foot independence.

Punk and Heavy Metal could be stated under two headings, but they are similar in nature. Punk and Heavy Metal is the newest style today and is another sub-genre of rock. Punk normally plays quarter notes on the hi-hat but uses the typical quarter or eighth note rhythms on the snare and bass drum. You could say it is opposite to funk, as in funk the hi-hat cymbal part is sped up, and in punk the cymbal part is slowed down in relation to the snare and bass drum. Punk drumming is extremely fast, it is actually the fastest style of drumming.

..:: Rock Drumming ::..

..:: Jazz Drumming ::..

..:: Funk Drumming ::..

..:: R&B/Rap/Pop Drumming ::..

..:: Cultural Drumming ::..

A fill in punk is normally an extremely fast single stroke roll on the snare drum. However better punk styled drummers like Travis Barker (pictured right) use the change up from snare to the tom toms at a crazy tempo to make a fill. Many punk beats are on the off beat, that is the snare is played on the 1, 3 and the bass drum on 2, 4. Heavy Metal also uses this as well, but at a slightly slower tempo. Heavy Metal tends to experiment with other styles of drumming, like playing a jazz pattern in a song. John Dolmayan (pictured left) and the band Korn do this in a few of their songs. Heavy Metal focuses heavily on just the snare and bass drum. The drummer Lars Ulrich from Metallica is famous for doing this.

..:: Punk/Heavy Metal Drumming ::..