The Rock Drum Lessons section of DrumLessons.com is filled to the brim with free drum lessons on arguably the most popular style of drumming in the world today. The term "rock" is used quite loosely nowadays. It's an umbrella term that encompasses a great variety of styles of music such as heavy-metal, punk rock, progressive rock, and even funk and pop. Therefore, the drum beats and drum fills you'll learn how to play with these free drum lessons can actually be used with a wide variety of music styles. Much like all the sections on DrumLessons.com, the free drum lessons you'll find within are organized by difficulty level. You can go through them however you feel like it, but we highly encourage you to move through them by difficulty level. To get this rock party started, learn your first rock drum beats and fills with the free drum lessons "Beginner Tom-Tom Drum Beats" and "Quarter Note Drum Fills".
Since "rock" is an umbrella term, you can expect to find free drum lessons on various styles of music in this section. A good example of this are the free drum lessons "Beginner Punk Rock Drum Beats" and "Intermediate Punk Rock Drum Beats", which instruct you on some of the bands and drummers that have made of punk rock what it is today while teaching you how to play this style of music authentically. This section is also a great place for learning about cool drumming concepts like linear drumming. This is a concept where the strokes from your patterns never overlap. To learn how to apply it to drum beats check the free drum lessons "Beginner Linear Drum Beats" and "Intermediate Linear Drum Beats". We've put together the free drum lessons "Beginner 16th Note Linear Drum Fills" and "Intermediate 16th Note Linear Drum Fills" to teach how to come up with some slick rock-based linear drum fills of your own. Since this is a drumming concept it's not restricted to one drumming style in particular. You can apply it to every style of music taught in this or any other section on DrumLessons.com.
Although rock drumming is very powerful, driving, and highly dependable on the 8th note, it's easy to create different felling sections within a song with small changes. This section on rock drumming is packed with patterns that will show you how to do so. Moving your ride/hi-hat patterns to the toms is a great way of toning down verse and bridge sections. You can learn more about this by going through the free drum lessons "Beginner Tom-Tom Drum Beats" and "Intermediate Tom-Tom Drum Beats". The free drum lesson "Half-Time Drum Beats" teaches you how to create space with your drumming for bridge and break-down chorus sections, by cutting the rhythmic feel by half. The content of "Two-Handed Hi-Hat Drum Beats" is a little bit different in that it is used primarily to enable drummers to play 16th note hi-hat patterns at fast tempos.
Along with different feeling drum beats, this section provides different feeling drum fills. The coolest thing about them is that they're based on the most common note values in western music. By going through them you'll not only learn how to play some cool sounding rock drum fills, but also practice your sense of rhythm. You can start by working on the free drum lesson "Quarter Note Drum Fills", since the quarter note is the note value from whom the other ones derive. For instance, 8th notes are twice as fast as quarter notes and 16th notes are four times faster than quarter notes. To help you study 8th note-based drum fills we've put together the free drum lessons "8th Note Drum Fills" and "Broken 8th Note Drum Fills". As for 16th notes, you can go through the free drum lessons "Beginner Broken 16th Note Drum Fills" and "Intermediate Broken 16th Note Drum Fills". Don't stop on quarter note, 8th note, and 16th note drum fills. There are a lot of cool drum fills based on other note values like 8th note triplets, 16th note triplets and 32nd notes. The free drum lesson "The Herta Sweep" is a great example of just that.
Rock music is mostly played in 4/4 time signature. However, it's crucial to learn how to play in different time signatures to cater to the demands of certain rock styles. To help you out with this, we've included free drum lessons on various odd-time signatures within this section. Two of those odd-time signatures are 5/4 and 7/8. Watch the videos "How To Count 5/4 Odd-Time" and "Learning 7/8 Odd-Time" to learn how to count, play, and feel these odd-time signatures. Once you've learned the basics behind a given odd-time signature, you can start applying it to the drum set with the help of the free drum lessons from this section. In the case of 5/4 and 7/8, the free drum lessons "Beginner 5/4 Drum Beats" and "Beginner 7/8 Drum Fills" will help you do just that.
Showmanship techniques are not an essential aspect of rock drumming - and of drum set playing for that matter. They are a hell of a lot fun to play and showcase nonetheless, and can add a lot of flare to your rock drum solos and performances on stage. With the free drum "Double Stroke Sweeps" for instance, you'll learn how to incorporate the double stroke roll into a very cool showmanship technique. Drum rudiments? Boring? We think not!
