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How to Read Drum Notation

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Part of the video series: Reading Drum Melodic Rhythms & Rests

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Summary: Learn some great tips on how to read drum notation and sheet music in this free music video on reading basic drum melodies, rhythms, and rests.

Views: 1,806 | Tags: theory, instruments, sheet, musical, sheetmusic, rhythms, rests, music theory

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Ryan Larson Ryan Larson is a young jazz composer whose teaching technique focuses on the basics of music theory in all twelve keys. When applying his twelve-key technique... read more

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Video Transcript

How to Read Drum Notation

So today, we're going to go through a long piano piece, both hands and we're going to go measure by measure. And what's good about this piece is each measure is geared towards a different rhythm. So, some of the rhythms and different rests are going to come up quicker, but we're going to through this entire piece and you can skip ahead to each one and if you want to learn a specific rhythm or a specific type of rest, you can skip ahead and go to that measure, or you can go through the whole piece with us today. It's good for your classical reading chaps or your jazz reading chaps and what's great about it is, we're going to go through and learn all these different rhythms and we have this nice melodic line here, then we get into some more syncopated raggae-esque type stuff here and we're really doing a lot of rests and it's all syncopated and then we have triplets here and then take it out. Very nice, simple melody and it's all in C major. The great thing about this, is if you can go through and analyze it, again, we number the scale one through seven and you can analyze all these notes out of those seven notes, and if you can analyze it you can play it in any key just like that. And we're going to demonstrate that by playing this exact same thing, reading it in C and playing it in B flat major or A flat major. And again, the more you do this, you can do this with any classical tune, the better your chaps and your site reading skills will get much quicker and you'll get a lot quicker at advancing in those skills because you'll be taking it to another level, which is what you've got to do.

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