Knowing all the important drum related terms is valuable if you want to talk about drums in an online discussion forum or at your local music store.

Video Transcription

In this video lesson, we’ll be going over several basic drum related terms that you’ll need to know as a drummer. This information will be valuable to you as you progress through various lessons on this website. It’s also great for our discussing drumming in our online discussion forums or with your drumming friends, and the guys at the local music store. Let’s start with the basic terms on the drum set. So right here, I got my bass drum. The right in front of me is my snare drum. Then I have the two toms up here. Now, this is the first tom, the second tom, or they call it a high tom, mid tom and some people like to call them rack toms. Then below I have a 16-inch floor tom or the low tom. Now over here, I got my high hat cymbals. Right beside that I have a crash cymbal. Over here I have another crash, and then the ride cymbal. Now down here I have my high hat pedal and this just moves the high hats up and down. Then I have a double bass drum pedal. So I have one on the left and one on the right. If we look even closer, we can even examine more specific terms. Let’s take a look at the snare drum. First, we have the rim which pulls down the drum head. Now, what pulls down the rim is the tension rods here on the side. These are also used to tune the drum. And then those tension rods go into the logs. These are Yamaha Nouveau Logs, but logs are pretty much the same. These act a little bit differently but they’re pretty much all the same. Then we have the snare drum throw off on the left over here, but sometimes on the right, however you setup your snare drum. But it’s on the left and those hold the snare drum wires on below the drum. So you can turn them off… and turn on. See how the snare sounds. Now let’s look at the toms. They operate quite similar to the snare drum. Obviously they just don’t have the snare drum wires on them. They have the rim. They have the tension rods. And that one thing you need to know about toms is they have the batter head which is the top head, and then they have the resonance head, same as the snare drum. So the batter head, batter means that’s the one you hit. The resonance head is when you don’t hit the fusion at the bottom, it’s used to make the drum resonate. Now let’s move to the cymbals. So there’s three main points to the cymbal. In the center we have the bell, then the bow, then we have the edge. And this applies to all the cymbals. Up here we have a bell, the bow, the edge, same with the ride and my other crash. Now all the cymbals are supported by stands. Over here I have a boom stand. Now there’s some cymbal stands which are just straight. There’s no boom. And then the cymbals are screwed on with the felt on top and below to protect the cymbal from wearing, and then tighten with the wing up. Now, believe it or not, there are several terms elated to drum sticks. We have the shoulder of the stick, then the whole shaft here, then we have the tip. There’s wood tip and nylon tip. The butt end, and below here you have the model and the name of the stick. Now I’m sure there are many other terms that I might have missed, but I’ll be posting in text form all the other terms on the freedrumlessons.com website. So you can go there and review them all.