How To Play The Essential Drum Rudiments

Drum Rudiments are the most important aspect to drumming. They are the fundamentals to all percussion, and should not be ignored. A drummer should know all of the key drum rudiments, and be able to perform them without hesitation. Without the practice of these, you are limiting your skills and possibility as a drummer.Let’s break this down a bit, and look at why drum rudiments are so important to practice.

What Is A Drum Rudiment?

Drum rudiments are basic drum patterns, used as practice exercises. They are basically the foundation of drumming, or the basics of stick control, and wrist movement. There are many different rudiments out there. You may hear some people talking about the 40 essential drum rudiments. This may seem like a lot however, most of these are just variations of each other. Drum rudiments should be practiced on a practice pad or a snare drum. They simply help train your fingers and wrists with speed, power, control, as well as independence.

Why Are Drum Rudiments Important?

Practicing your drum rudiments as a drummer is a lot like going to the gym as a professional athlete. A hockey player must train his muscles to be able to skate faster, shoot harder, and hit harder. The same is for a drummer – we must train our muscles to hit harder, more accurate, and faster. This is where drum rudiments come into play. They force us to do nothing else but practice stick movement. A lot of times drummers will get side tracked on a drum kit and lose out on valuable practice time. Going through the basic exercises will drastically improve your skills on the drum set; allowing you to roll a lot faster, and giving you more options on the drum set.

Pros and Cons of Practicing Rudiments

To be honest, there are not a lot of cons to practicing these drum rudiments. As a drummer, you should be practicing these drum rudiments more often then you practice on a drum set.You can never go wrong by practicing your essential drum rudiments. The good thing about these is it will force you to go back to the core of drumming. Like I mentioned before, it is easy to get distracted with the drums in front of you, but when you are using a practice pad working on your rudiments, you do not have that option. However, that could also be a problem. Some may get used to the practice pad, and find it hard to transfer back to the drum set. Another problem with rudimental practice is it does not work on creativity, and independence on the drum set. Being limited to a single pad, you are unable to hear the different drum voices, thus hindering your creative edge