5 Ways To Freshen Up Your Drum Beats

The techniques below are designed to be simple ways to make your drum beats more interesting. Some of the techniques completely change the feel of your beats. So, use wisely!

Your Usual Drum Beat

Here’s a standard drum beat. We’ll be using this as the drum beat we’re applying the techniques to.

Move It To The Tom

The simplest way to change your drum beat is to move your right stick to the low tom. Turn it into a tom groove! The notation below looks complicated, but it’s essentially the same as the original drum beat.

Move Some To The Tom

It can be cool to experiment with moving only a few of your right stick strokes to the tom (instead of all of them). You can create some cool multi-layer effects. The example below moves to the low tom only in a few places.

Add a Crash

Adding crash cymbals to your groove can be cool. However, a big, full crash probably isn’t the best for a repetitive drum beat. A splash cymbal, china or other effects cymbal will work best. In the beat below, a crash is played along with each bass drum stroke.

Add Less Crash

Too much crashing might not be what’s called for. You can select one or two places instead.

Displace The Snare

Often, our drum beats have a snare drum backbeat on beats 2 and 4. Moving the snare to before or after beat 2 or 4 can have a cool effect.

I hope you enjoy exploring these techniques with your drum beats. If you come up with something cool, please share it with us in the comments below. We can even feature it on this page.

Have a great week of drums. Be sure to check out Steve Ley’s drum beat (with audio) tomorrow. Keep drumming!

What’s next?

Coupled with technique-building coordination exercises and hundreds of motivational examples, our method books guide you from beginner level to advanced drumming. Enjoy hundreds of examples taken from chart-topping songs from the 60s through today:

Chart-Topping Drum Beats: The 60s Through Today

Chart-Topping Drum Fills: The 60s Through Today