Student Videos

Avenged Sevenfold - "Shepherd of Fire"

Murdoch loves playing double bass drum pedals. The song begins with an ostinato groove on tom toms and steady quarter notes on the bass drum. There are syncopated crash/bass drum strokes on the off beats of the phrase. Murdock does a great job making all 16th notes on the double bass drums very clean and even. Also, he adds quite a bit of improvisation to make it more fun. Excellent job, Murdoch!

System of a Down - "Chop Suey!"

Interesting composition played really well by Eugene. The song starts with a "tribal-like" tom tom groove, followed by hi-hat/bass drum/snare drum 16th note beats. The drumming is quite varied throughout the song. You can hear half-time feel in the choruses when Eugene uses the ride cymbal, and regular feel in the verses using a quarter-note pulse on the hi-hat. The instrumental part is a double-time feel.

The Police - "Message in a Bottle"

Suyash is a big fan of Stewart Copeland's drumming. He decided to use traditional grip for this performance. What really drives the song is the moving forward momentum provided by the drummer. There are cool grooves between the ride cymbal and the hi-hat, cross-stick patterns on the snare drum, and fills. The composition leaves plenty of space for creativity and improvisation.

The Beatles - "Day Tripper"

Peter had a lot of fun learning and playing this rock song (you can see that by some of the stick twirling he did at the beginning of the video :). We decided to go with the instrumental version, where the vocal part is played by the saxophone. The original drummer of the Beatles (Ringo Starr) was famous for using unison beats between the bass/snare/hi-hat, and Peter provided a very solid drumming with absolutely no "flamming". The coda has plenty sixteenth-note and quarter-note half bar triplet fills.

Rush - "Jacob's Ladder"

Alec decided to pick "Jacob's Ladder" for his project. The song begins with a rudimental, military-sounding snare drum/bass drum combinations in phrases of 5/4 and 6/4 time, played "on top" of the 4/4 synthesizer & vocal pars, then leads to more traditional rock beats. The second part of the song switches back and forth between 6/8 and 7/8 time signatures and sounds like a real progressive rock.

Here are some videos of our students. While some of our aspiring drummers have been playing for some time, others picked up the drumsticks only a few months ago. You're welcome to leave a positive comment like:

"Your fills are cool", or "Your timekeeping is great", or "Your drumming is very exciting!", etc.

It will inspire our young rising rock stars to practice more and continue growing.

One Direction - "Best Song Ever"

Here is an interesting example of modern pop music, where no acoustic instruments are used. The original song is made entirely using computers, and that’s how most pop songs are made nowadays. Kristi’s job was to imitate the sound of pre-programmed drum loops, but to add a bit of “human touch“ to it. The verses are played on the hi-hat, bass drum, and snare drum with accents on the crash cymbal/open hi-hat/floor tom. There is a fun 16th note part played with two hands on the hi-hat with syncopated snare drum at the end of the chorus. Kristi, why did you pick the drums as your main instrument? Because it’s fun!