Drum Set: Rock

Rock music spans many decades and sub-genres, and this section is designed as an introduction to the straight 8th-note version of rock, which is the most common from the 1960s-1990s, and crosses over to other genres as well.

Download and print this worksheet to help guide your practice. This is a kind of “Stick Control” for the basic coordination used in Rock drumming. By playing 2-3 voices in a static pattern and moving only one part at a time, you cover most combinations possible for future grooves. This will save you an incredible amount of time going forward.

Download and print this worksheet to help guide your practice. This is enough variety to get you going on a wide range of rock sub-styles, but not so much as to slow you down. Basically everything you play after these will be a variation or extension of these ideas, and the way forward is to play anything you like or that you’re given, and allow yourself time to evolve with the tools you build here.

Download and print this worksheet to help guide your practice. The 4+4 version is by far the most common, but the others can be useful as well. Explore here and move on, come back for anything that’s a struggle later when you have more experience.

Download and print this worksheet to help guide your practice. This is the good stuff. These are all industry-standard fills that will work extremely well. You’ll notice a lot of scholastic charts have overly simplified versions of these fills written into them. Substitute these anywhere they fit, and feel free to re-orchestrate and modify to fit a song or specific situation.

Download and print this worksheet to help guide your practice. 2-beats not enough? These can all be combined into 4-beat fills as well. The following chart shows all 90 unique combinations of these 10 fill ideas, and you can plug-in anything else you learn to them as well. Rock in an infinitely renewable genre precisely because of ideas like this.