Hi, and welcome to Week One of drum lessons in the music coach program. Today we're going to get you started on some basic fundamentals like how to hold your sticks and where to put your feet and how to hold your body to get started on playing the drum kit. The drum kit is truly a fun and exciting instrument to play. And it's one of the few instruments where both your feet and both your arms and your whole body get involved in the making of the music and it's one of the things I love about drums. Now to get started, every drum kit is a little bit different. This is a fairly standard setup.

And I'm going to talk for a minute just about what the names of all the drums are. My right foot is on the kick drum which is sometimes also called the bass drum, and it's played with a pedal like that. My left foot is holding these two symbols which are called the high hats and they also go up and down with my left The drum right between my legs is called the snare drum, because it has little metal chains on the bottom that allow it to rattle. You can also turn them off, so that it sounds like a regular drum, but we're gonna leave them on for now. The drum right in front of me is called a rack tom. And the drum to the left of me is called the floor tom.

I also have two symbols, a crash symbol, and a ride symbol. And the main difference between these two is the size the crash symbols a little smaller and the right symbols a little bigger. Now, the drum kit has been around for most of the 20th century and into the 21st century. It's a collection of instruments that used to be played by individual people in marching bands. So the marching band used to be someone's job just to play the bass drum and they would have a big mallet. And then usually play on both sides.

And someone else would be playing the snare drum. And they'd have strapped around and they'd be playing like this. And someone else would be playing cymbals or making them go together like this. And when music moves from being out in the street to being in nightclubs and in theaters, there, people started to realize how can we get all this to be in one place and have one person do it because there's not always tons of space to have different people playing different instruments. So the drum kit is an amalgamation of a bunch of different percussion instruments. In this week's practice video, we're going to start by learning how to hold the sticks properly.

So what you're going to do is hold the stick between your thumb and pointer finger, like this, and you're going to want to leave enough space at the bottom of the drumstick so that your hand can close around it with a little bit of space left over. This is why it's a little different for everyone, depending on the size of your hands, so I can't tell you exactly where I'm going. Stick to grab it, you'll have to work on that on your own. So once you grab it like this, this is called the fulcrum, which is the pivot point where the stick swings from most of the grip that you're using on the stick is happening right here. Then you're going to rest the hand. Then you're going to rest the stick in your hand and close your fingers gently around it.

Now you don't want to grip the stick, you're just mostly holding it between the pointer finger and the thumb. And once your hands are together like this, you're going to turn them over and your posture so your back should be straight and your legs should be going straight out in front of you and your arms will form a triangle. One little thing about how high to keep your stool, you want to keep your leg at a 90 degree angle. So if your legs are coming up above your hip, or are pointing way down, then your seat needs to go up or down so that your legs are coming straight out and down. Once you have your good posture going and your triangle ready You're going to work on just making a sound on the snare drum. So, to do this, you want to let the stick bounce so we don't push the stick into the drum.

You let it go and let it drop and bounce. Like this. And eventually when we're doing single strokes, you'll let the stick bounce and pick it up away from the drum like this. Alright, we'll see in the practice video.