Choosing the Right Beat for Your Song 🥁

Aug 11, 2019

Hey guys!
 
I want to do a video just talking about drums today. This is something that I'm really passionate about. Drums are my main instrument. I've studied them for more years than I care to mention. And I want to talk about choosing the right beat for your song. 
 
Check out the video. :) 
 
xxx - Josh
 
 
<Transcription>
… one of the reasons that your song misses the mark. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play a piano chord progression and it's just going to be on a loop and I'm going to play a variety of different beats over that chord progression. And it's all gonna be the exact same tempo. Nothing's going to change. And you're going to hear how these different beats over the same piano, a progression change the entire feeling of it. It'll make it sound like it's all of a sudden a dance song or one might make it feel like it's a ballad.
One is going, we're going to explore some Latin fields like reggaeton. Maybe that kind of like gives it like a, that kind of like island flavor. I'm even going to change the time signature. Like right now I hear this piano in a four, four times signature. We're going to see what happens if we change it to a six, eight or 12 eight a time feel all within the exact same tempo. So here we go. I'm going to play a little bit of the piano progression and then I'm going to start playing some ideas and I'll talk to you in between
Right now in your, this one, two, three, three, one, two is it right there in the snare is on B3 and the kick is on me, but we could switch it. So the snare drums are two and four, the scenarios on two and four. We could also do, we could also do like a Motown feel where the scenarios are on every downbeat or we can do the scenarios and on me. So
I also look at some Latin flavors. So one of the traditional Latin fields is Samba, which has a double bass drum repeating pattern like this
That could lend itself going into like a Boston Nova field. Or we can go into like a reggae feel, which is like this. We could also look at switching it from an eight four, four to a six eight by four, four I mean there's four county, four beats per measure. One, two, three, four one, two, three. We get switch that accounting to me like one, two, three, four, five, six one, two, three, five, six
Going back to four, four. We could also do something like what they use in Ed Sheeran's photograph where the snare drum just hits on beat four and the rest are accented on the toms. This kind of gives it like a tribal feel or we can take those accents that were split between the Tom and the snare and put them all on this snare, which is going to give it a more driving tribal field.
And then just to show you where we'll kind of run through a bunch of these seamlessly using kind of hear how it changes. So this is where we began.
So yeah, that's just a, just a handful. Those are just the ones that I could think of off the top of my head. And you can hear how drastically that changes the exact same chord progression without changing the tempo at all. So put some serious consideration into what rhythm you want to be the foundation of your song. And you know, you don't have to pick one cause you can see that, you know, I could switch between a bunch of those so you could have one for your verse, one for your chorus. But just be thinking about that. It makes a big a big difference on how your song is felt.
 
 

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