3 secrets to effortless CHICKS & SPLASHES on the hats

if you want to use your left foot more in grooves like time keeping or you want to just be able to create different unique sounds on the hats with your left foot whether it's a chick or a splash or even a sizzle really cool sound then you're definitely in the right place today because we're going to talk about all of this today we're digging into the three secrets of successful left foot timekeeping and sound creation on the hats and so we're talking about coordination and foot technique and hi-hat optimization lots of good stuff that's really going to change your approach here ultimately this is a great way to challenge your coordination and spice up your grooves and create a pulse over here with your left foot that can glue your grooves together this is really cool totally worth learning so let's dig in you can do this i'm going to show you exactly how [Music] hey while you're here grab my free gift to you the know what to practice three part daily practice routine e-guide this guy is really cool because it breaks down the most essential areas of practice that every one of us needs to be doing regularly to make sure that you're not missing anything important you're hitting all the key areas and you're becoming a well-rounded versatile drummer reaching your full potential a lot of drummers have downloaded this guide it's the most popular one here on the channel and people get results from it it's great if you're busy and you don't have a lot of time to practice this helps because we're focusing on 30 minutes a day 30 minute practice sessions it's gonna help you gain confidence by knowing that you're making progress it can help you build coordination that'll help fix your weekend and lead to better hand technique and more fluid time and better kit navigation which leads to playing songs better and feeling better more relaxing at home at the kit you'll even learn five really great tips for playing songs well musically and most importantly you'll get out of whatever rut you might be stuck in you'll make sure that you're always making progress because you'll always know that next step that's essential you'll always know the next step so that you're continually growing and your skills so definitely check that out in the description below three-part daily practice guide before you go let's dig into today's lesson i'm going to give it to you straight the three secrets are ideal high hat symbol adjustment very simple some quick tips will get you squared away appropriate foot techniques for chicks versus splashes because they often require a different kind of foot technique that you're using and then three a strategy in place for building left foot coordination so number three is not exactly a quick tip but when you know how to build your left foot coordination that's an important part of this and that's definitely one of the three secrets so that's what we're breaking down today there it is let's get rolling now we're going to start off with something nice and controversial so a lot of times when i whenever i talk about in a video high house spacing i'll always encourage people to have at least a one inch spacing between the hi-hats maybe even an inch and a quarter and if you're crazy an inch and a half it's going to be different the the distance is going to depend on which side we're talking because of bottom hat angle which we'll talk more about in a minute but a lot of times i get a lot of pushback when i talk about that because there are a lot of drummers who are trying to work with double bass and they want to be able to play an open hat sound with their stick without having to have their foot on the hi-hat stand now that's okay and it's fine if that's what works best for you and so your default hi-hat looseness is like right here that way without a foot on there you can get a nice open sound but that's very limiting i understand that you've got to make sacrifices if you're doing double bass and you may even opt to have multiple hi-hat stands adjusted different ways maybe you've got hats on a remote stand a lot of metal drummers do that i'm not really in that world i don't do a lot of double bass uh i can fake my way through some double bass if i need to but it's just not a style of i'm not i'm not good enough into metal i guess to really get deep into double bass so i want to address that to say if you're in that world that's probably why you're going to disagree with some of what i'm going to say but if you want to play chicks and splash as well you have to do what i'm going to tell you to do today so you've got to pick and choose where your priorities are going to be here and yes you do have to make sacrifices logistical sacrifices depending on what you're playing the most what you're doing more of for me not being a heavy double bass player i like to have my hats adjusted this way this far apart that way i can play better sounding chicks and splashes because what has to happen in order to play a firm chick you've got to have enough distance here that you can get enough acceleration that they actually close firmly otherwise we're like way down here that's the loudest we can go so you're not going to have good check timekeeping if you've got them adjusted for this kind of open hat playing without a foot on there if you're in that world that's the compromise you've decided to make but if you want to play chicks well you've got to open them up more and about the one inch one and a quarter inch spot is perfect i mean that's yeah that's about an inch and a quarter on this side now bottom hat angle is also very important here because if both symbols are perfectly parallel you hardly get any sound when you close them unless you've got those rippled kind of hats where you can kind of get away with that a little bit but with normal hats you end up with almost that air lock kind of thing or if they both are perfectly parallel it just kind of not much sound so make sure you've got your bottom hi-hat angle adjusted just enough i don't know exactly what the angle is you can figure it out sit there and play chicks while you've got your hand on that screw adjusting that go a little tighter keep playing listen go a little leveler keep listening angle a little more listen and you'll find where that sweet spot is because if you angle too much it's too much of like a slap kind of sloppy sound but if there's not enough angle it's too quiet so find your sweet spot you can do it just sit there and mess around with that with that screw while you're playing while you're listening this is what my sweet spot is as closely as you can tell there's not a lot of bottom hat angle basically i like to have that screw that lifts the the hi-hat to create that angle i like to have that on the far side i like for the bottom hi-hat symbol to angle toward me that way when i close the hats both hats actually become slightly tilted toward me it just seems logical because we want cymbals tilted toward us not away from us and so that's my opinion on that some drummers like to go the other way it doesn't really matter not a big deal whatever makes sense to you now as far as the foot technique goes when you're playing chicks you really have to put a lot of leg weight into that like if i just go that's fine and maybe that's the sound that we want where it's a more softer thicker kind of chick sound but most of the time we wanted to be a little more especially for playing jazz and most of the time we do want it to be very articulate i guess you could say [Music] and so if that's what we're doing we've actually got to use our leg to push more weight into it so that it closes firmly so what i'm doing is i'm playing heel up with my left foot i've always been a heel down kick drum player most comfortable to me it keeps me balanced my right my right heel is basically my anchor so i'm anchored here left leg just bounces like crazy and that's actually how i keep time with my left foot we'll talk about that a little more in a moment but i'm actually playing heel up and i'm basically bouncing my leg and pressing in with my big toe it's really the big toe at least if it's not big toe it's at least this part of my foot that's putting the pressure in [Music] and you can see right there going into splashes that's where i'd rather lower my heel so if i go heel down then it's easier to just close and like tap it's like tapping the cymbals together letting them glance off each other open right back up easiest to do that if you've got your heel down so all you have to do is pivot your foot [Music] [Music] now if you're playing a faster series of splashes like if you wanted to keep quick time playing splashes then you might want to lift your heel because of what i call the leg bounce a lot of drummers do this isn't anything i came up with i just call it this i don't know if anybody else does but the leg balance is where you're just bouncing your leg to keep time while you're playing a lot of drummers do this naturally and once you've built up some left foot coordination it makes a lot of sense to do this and kind of help your time keeping too and so i'll be playing along [Music] my left leg will just be bouncing over here my heel is bouncing i'm actually keeping my big toe in contact with the foot plate my foot's going like this and then as i want to increase the volume of the chicks i'm just letting my foot letting my big toe a little bit off the footplate so that then my whole foot starts to bounce more and so i can just do this pivot for my big toe for almost no sound or just silent time keeping and then allow my whole foot to come up a little more big toe to come up a little more and there's the chick time keeping by the way don't sweat the splashing that happens between them you listen to old led zeppelin recordings you hear bottom doing this you hear that same kind of sound going on it just adds some character to it don't worry about the splashing between the chicks it doesn't have to be pristine chickage here and if you do want it to be that way you just have to put your hand on it like this even there if you go fast there's still some splashing it's unavoidable it's just the sound of the instrument so don't worry about that but so what we're starting to talk about if you want to do faster splashing like you could do that heel down like i just did but eventually you get to a certain tempo it could still work but you might find it easier to then lift up your heel and go like this [Music] because of how you can get into that motion of bouncing your leg and if you're able to just keep your leg bouncing then it becomes more natural to play them quickly versus when heels down sometimes it's hard to get your foot to just pivot fast enough so if you're not able to get fast enough with your left foot just try going heel up or if you're going very slowly and you want it more controlled and that's where heel down can make more sense now there's a third sound that i call sizzles i think that's the pretty universal name for it where we play a splash but then instead of leaving the hats open after the splash we go where as soon as we splash we gradually close them back so then they're vibrating against each other which i think is a more interesting sound and in order to do that well you definitely have a lot of angle and definitely a lot of foot control heel down i'm controlling exactly how far pressed down my foot is on the foot plate i think those sound really cool in a lot of musical contexts also an important note i didn't mention this earlier make sure your top symbol is loose don't screw it down super tight if you do that you're not going to get good sounds and you're especially not going to get a good sloshy or open hat sound make sure that things are loose and able to move here there's no reason to clamp this tight and honestly some might argue it's bad for your symbol anytime you've got something clamped tight that means the symbol can't absorb as much of the energy from the stick which can put more stress on it potentially result in cracking that's why you never want to screw down felt super tight on your cymbals i like going no felt so there's no reason to have them so on your hi-hats just keep it loose make sure that like it can freely swing there's not much pressure at all from the felt so if that can be loose that's gonna help a lot with the sizzling especially sizzles they're gonna sound really cool and then sloshy stuff open hat stuff is gonna sound great too it's gonna be very smooth and very natural sounding so just practice those foot motions practice sitting there and going like this planting your big toe bouncing your heel and practice doing that in time with a groove which leads us into the coordination exercises we'll get to in a moment but practice just bouncing like that and then gradually morphing into chicks soft at first and gradually getting louder practice doing splashes do it with your metronome start slowly work on doing it steadily and then practice doing quicker splashes like this when you're doing that by the way you're suspending your heel in the air and then you're pivoting your foot in order to play those notes so your foot is just pivoting up and down not your whole leg you don't want your whole leg moving just your foot pivoting and i think that makes sense if you're going very fast but anything below very fast i'd rather just keep my heel planted because i feel like i get better control over splashes that way and remember of course the super important thing of have space between your cymbals without that space none of this works so if you're going to stubbornly refuse to open your hi-hats as much as i'm telling you to you're going to struggle with this i know you've got to compromise and you've got to make sacrifices if you're trying to do the double bass thing you're just going to have to adjust them on a per song basis and so if there's a song where you want to do splashes or sizzles or strong chicks you just got to quickly adjust them a little bit it doesn't take long just takes a second and then adjust them back to where you had them for your double bass playing all right so we went through those first secrets there so optimization adjustment here and then foot technique practice the foot technique make sure you got your optimization squared away but now secret number three we've got to have a strategy in place for building left foot coordination and we also want it to be fun we don't want to get bogged down in building coordination we want coordination to be a fun endeavor that's very fruitful and helps us play more musically and so start out by pick some favorite songs and so whether it's a favorite song that has like a tom part or maybe you're playing over here on the ride and there's room for left foot time keeping so find a groove you can play that allows the potential for left foot time keeping the simpler the groove the better we're just going to start with a super basic kick on one and three snare on two and four kind of groove and we're just going to add in some different potential left foot time keeping patterns i'll show these to you notation is in the description below you can go download the free pdf if you want to see this written out [Music] that is the simplest most practical way to incorporate the left foot into a groove and those are things those are patterns there that you can use in so many different songs whether or not you hear it on the record is something that you can use and you can add just because you want to and it can often help glue grooves together what i've always found is that if i'm playing a tom groove that's very sparse or maybe kind of random like [Music] being able to keep just a steady quarter note over here is so helpful for the rest of the band especially vocalists vocalists love the left foot hi-hat he used to play a bunch with a worship leader who he was playing acoustic guitar and he found it so helpful to crank up the hi-hat mic there was a close mic on my hi-hat and so he would crank that up in his mix and he would look over and see that going on and it helped him lock in it's something visual because of the opening and closing and it's something you can clearly hear and so anytime you're playing something that might get a little syncopated or they might get a little sparse or even if you're at a quiet part of a song and you just need to make sure the band's staying together and not rushing or dragging a little bit of that goes a long way so practice just a basic groove kick one and three snare two and four eighth notes on the ride and practice doing left foot with the snare on two and four and then quarter notes eights hands practice that step by step take it nice and slow but you'll get that together more quickly than you think because it's really not that hard it's difficult for it to become autopilot that's what takes some time to get the autopilot left foot timekeeping where you can play anything over here while keeping a pattern here that does take some time it takes a lot of repetiti repetitive it takes a lot of repetitive repetition a lot of repetition in your practicing just logging the hours the more you use this on gigs the more you can try to use this on gigs use it every day when you practice the easier it gets so push yourself to do that push yourself to do this and to make this a default thing that you do when you're playing basic grooves bounce your leg when you've got your leg bouncing like we talked about a minute ago playing those eighth notes it kind of becomes natural [Music] all you're doing is you're just bouncing your leg that can become autopilot that can become autopilot because it's a motion and even if you're playing quarter notes or ands that same bounce can be happening so just practice that spend some time spend some time getting to know your hi-hat getting to know your left foot's capabilities you can do this just be patient with it and eventually you'll get to where the more you do this the more you're able to start deviating from it and doing more syncopation over here while maintaining this here's another exercise that helps a lot with that practice playing paired tittles with your feet it might sound ridiculous it might sound really hard but it's not that hard when you just sit there and you do it by the way make sure you can play paradiddles with your hands first if you're total beginner brand new to this practice going right left right right left right left left slowly with your hands coordinating both sides of your brain to work together and then just have your feet do it kick hat kick kick hat kick hat hat right left right right left right left left and then gradually get a little faster with it knowing that as you get faster you have to think about the techniques that you're using being able to do them more quickly you'll start to hear some splashing up here when you're playing chicks that's fine but the more comfortable you can get with that what happens is that forces your brain to be okay with the hi-hat happening in a random place it's happening on all these different parts of the b different subdivisions which helps a lot with eventually learning how to do [Music] where you can sit there and just like do crazy stuff with your left foot while you're playing a simple groove paradiddles with the feet helps with that so what you can do get going with the paradiddles very slowly then add in eighth note timekeeping with the right hand by the way we're counting these as 16th notes one e and uh two e and so eighth notes with the right hand then add in a back beat every two and four one e and a two e remember that slowness more important than speed for sure the way that you build coordination the way you teach your brain to process a lot of things at once by doing them slowly slow playing slow repetition leads to coordination which then naturally leads to speed so don't push against the speed wall don't don't try to get fast yet take pride and satisfaction and fulfillment and doing this very slowly because when you do it slowly know that that's how you're building those pathways you're rewiring your brain putting new things on autopilot building new muscle memory then it starts to lock together then speed becomes easy speed becomes a given eventually be patient with it now you can do a lot of different things here you can also do different foot patterns you can do an inverted paradiddle you can do different forms of paradiddles you could go down the first page of george lawrence stone's stick control and do all those random stickings with your feet while doing eighth notes with the right hand back beats with the left hand and the sky's the limit with how far you can mix this up and turn this into crazy foot coordination exercises so i'm not going to throw all that at you in this video because all i want you to know all you need to know right now is what is your first step quarter notes eighth notes ands also just two and four with your left foot in the midst of a normal groove because that's the most practical fun musical way to do this get that going first don't even worry about the paradiddle stuff first do that first thing that was your first step second step is this where you start working together the paradiddles and bringing in the hands then from there when that's coming together then you can get crazy with it but don't be in a hurry know that coordination starts with slow simplicity that you repeat over and over again use this stuff as often as you can every day when you practice and once you can start using it on a gig that's when it really starts to accelerate when you're logging hours using your left foot it gets so much easier so i promise you you're going to get it you can do this you just got to work out it be patient so in light of all this talk about coordination that's ultimately where we've we've landed here that third secret is a big one having a coordination plan so you've got your first two steps here but if you want to dig deeper into this you really need to check out that guide i told you about earlier the three-part practice routine this is my most popular e-guide it's the one that gets most downloaded and it's the one that i see my online students using the most and it's just it's got so much good stuff in it it's loaded with coordination exercises so you can do what we did today times 10. and so once you've done these first two steps today i want you to dig into this guide i want you to check out different ways you can build foot coordination and be able to build just all-around four-way coordination in different contexts there's a lot of different ways you can practice the stuff presented in the guides you can literally pick and choose you want to practice some rock stuff do you want to do some swing you want to do some latin you want to do more rudimental kinds of patterns there's a lot of options available you can do these one at a time and just pick what you're most interested in but they're all right there in the three-part daily practice guide the whole point of this guide is to help you reach your drumming dreams in the midst of a busy life because in order to grow fast you've got to know what to practice and that's what this does it gives you an overview of all the key areas that you need to always be focusing on little bits of each consistently so that you grow and become a well-rounded professional sounding drummer and in doing this you gain a lot of confidence because you know that you're doing things right and you're learning the skills that really matter on top of that you're fixing your weekend you're building precise fluid time that translates to smooth navigation around the kit and then you're learning the five biggest tips for listening well playing musically so that's kind of the icing on the cake because we want to be musical drummers too and we want that to be the ultimate motivation behind all of this technical stuff we do if the music isn't inspiring your left foot chicks and splashes and left foot coordination and time keeping then how are you going to be motivated to practice this so you got to have some songs in mind you've got to have things that you're playing that you're having fun just jamming out to again even if the song doesn't have like left foot timekeeping audible to you as you're listening still practice it play whatever song that has like a tom part in it or a ride groove and just practice keeping time while you play it whether or not the drummer on the record did that use that fun song that you love jamming out to as an opportunity to practice your left foot timekeeping in a fun way and so by downloading that guide you'll stop wasting time you'll get out of whatever rut you might be stuck in you'll be able to know that you're making progress session after session day after day so definitely go download that it's helped thousands of drummers like you i want you to be one of them so i hope you got a lot out of today's lesson i hope you're able to make some progress with your left foot and with your technique i know i threw a lot at you today but follow these steps take action as best as you can those of you guys who take action consistently you are the star students you're the ones that get results from this that's what we want we want results this isn't about you watching my videos and being like oh it's great you know steven taught me something cool today what good is that if you don't go try to do it and so take action go to your practice room get to work on this i got faith in you i believe in you you can do this you can become the drummer you're meant to be you've got the resources in your hands now you've got everything in front of you so you know what to do so get to work thanks so much for watching if you haven't yet subscribed be sure to subscribe become a fellow non-glamorous drummer thanks for watching stay non-glamorous and i will see you on the next video

Channel: Stephen Clark

Views: 15,660

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Id: IThPkk71p2Y

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021