Groove Independence for Foot
Greetings and happy Monday to all you guys from Nashville! Through my journey of learning to play drum set and teaching others (Especially beginners) I found out the hardest thing for me was to gain total control with my bass drum foot. I wanted to give you guys a exercise I have written out that really helps me out. I call it Groove Independence for Foot. Here is the FREE downloadable link!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B011sytjSHyzOWVXMVlSOGJzYk0
I started to struggle with this when I was learning beginning grooves because my right hand would always want to follow my right foot when dealing with 16th notes on the bass drum. It was extremely frustrating. I wanted total control and still wanted to groove so i left the snare on 2 & 4. This was the justification of why I wrote this exercise.
These exercises deal with the concept of griding. I learned this term through my marching band/drum line years. It is basically going through every possible combination through a rhythmic figure with accents and groupings. However this exercise is not dealing with accents but groupings on the bass drum. With this exercise we are griding groupings of 16th notes on our foot with groupings of 1,2,3, and 4.
Exercises #1-#4 deal with groupings of 1 that are going to shift over 16th note (when we shift over notes but still contains the same note values it is known as a permutation)
Exercises #5-#8 deal with groupings of 2 that are going to shift over 16th note
Exercises #9-#12 deal with groupings of 3 that are going to shift over 16th note
Exercises #13 deal with a grouping of 4. This should really get your foot really going. You will develop foot speed on top of control.
Practice them out slow and slowly speed them up. Me personally I like the speed them up 5 BPM once I get them comfortable. Once you get an exercise comfortable then move on to the next one. Soon you will eventually be done with the page BUT remember the goal is not to get through the page but get them to sound good. Once you get them all down. trying playing it for 4 bars and move on down to the next exercise. It should sound like this...
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B011sytjSHyzWXRKQWQ4My16Ukk
Now for one of my favorite parts. I was always thought that once you learn something keep on tackling it different ways. So it was explained to we you can read things down instead of right to left. Think like reading an acronym instead of the way you read a book normally. So this would be like you would play 1 bar of each exercise which would sound like this....
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B011sytjSHyzV1V4ekY1TXhXQVk
This is my approach to really getting total control over my right foot. It also make a killer exercise before a live performance, session, or just to develop foot speed. Feel free to donate if you would like too on venmo @spotmccormick, if not then it is all good! Hope you can you use this and enjoy it.
ellievsbear
prguitarman
gummygunk
2087
turnnoffyourmind