Free Digital Book Download - Beginning Snare Drum And Drum Set Method Vol 1
- Eric Ching
- Feb 25
- 2 min read
Free Digital Book Download - Beginning Snare Drum And Drum Set Method Vol 1:
For Drum And Piano Lessons In Austin, TX and Online:
Beginning Snare Drum And Drum Set Method Vol 1 is an introductory book for the aspiring student who is looking to get into the world of percussion for the first time. It’s also a useful tool for the professional educator and is best used with a teacher. The concepts are introduced gradually, but the pieces aren’t necessarily in order of difficulty and can definitely be played out of order.
Each of the lessons introduces a new rhythm or concept like quarter notes, quarter rests, eighth notes, piano/forte, accents, sixteenth notes, eighth rests, buzz strokes, mezzo piano/mezzo forte, and crescendos/decrescendos. Within each lesson, there are a number of etudes, solos, grooves, fills, and overarching rhythms for improvisation. There is also space for you to compose at the end of each lesson so that you can begin to exercise your creativity as soon as possible. At the end, I have also included abbreviated sheet music for a handful of popular songs.
A lot of the beginning drum books out there have you playing these exercises that don’t necessarily sound like anything. If you zoom out, they just sound like random patterns so isn’t quite clear for students why they should be playing something like 4 rights followed by 4 lefts. Therefore, I sought to write etudes and solos that have a certain melodic quality and lyrical to them. Each one has a certain arc and flow to it and resolves in a logical fashion. The etudes are shorter pieces that help you gain facility on the instrument in a broken down way while the solos sound more like songs on their own.
The grooves can be played on their own or you can play along with any number of popular songs and I listed a few that go with each groove. The fills are just sample ideas that help you work on going between a groove and a fill that’s supposed to set up the following section. By repeating the 2 bars, it’s a better way to prepare yourself for playing a fill as opposed to grooving for 15 bars, stumbling over a fill, and starting over.
The overarching rhythms for improvisation are where you play that rhythm over every single surface of the drum kit so that no shape feels foreign when you have to use it later. You will have already exhausted all of the possibilities.
Sheet Music Song List: Yellow, My Girl, Let's Stay Together, Redbone, Say It Ain't So, In My Life
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