If you’ve been working on the Frequency Fundamentals series here at EasyEarTraining.com, you may be looking for a way to practice the skills it teaches. Fotios has created a special quiz for the first half of the series, covering drums and cymbals.

The Frequency Fundamentals course takes you from the most basic concepts, through to a working knowledge of the 10 core frequency bands which cover the human hearing range. The following two articles use sounds from a standard drum kit to get you started listening for frequencies:
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Welcome back to our frequency training series. If you’re new to the series, you may want to go back and start from the introductory overview to frequency training. If you aren’t really familiar with the parts of a standard drum kit, check out this overview before you read on.

Ahh….metallic percussion! (Cymbals, hi-hats, rides, bells, etc.) They can be the final seasoning to the overall rhythm sound of our drum kit. Or….they can be the most annoying assortment of clanging cacophonous racket that can only find an equal among banging and clanging trash can lids!

And what is the deciding factor? Click to read the rest…

A great drum groove is the foundation of popular music, but a surprising number of music lovers can’t tell a snare from a hi-hat. There are a number of articles coming up here on EasyEarTraining.com featuring drums so now seems as good a time as any to take a quick tour around the kit.

Being able to identify parts of a drum kit doesn’t just improve your appreciation of music, it’s also a great skill to have at your disposal when songwriting, allowing you to explain your ideas to your drummer or program a groove into a drum machine with something better than trial and error.

Hopefully by the end of this article you should be able to name all the common parts of a drum kit by sight and by sound.

Lets start by taking a look around a typical rock kit:

A Typical Rock Drumkit

1. Hi-Hat
2. Ride
3. Crash
4. Splash
5. China
6. Snare
7. Bass Drum
8. Tom Tom

It may look pretty complicated, but we can soon break it down.
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