Welcome to the second lesson of the rhythm primer. Today we're going to learn more about hearing a beat in your favorite songs.

Let's learn some drums! One of the best ways to figure out a song's basic beat is to listen to the drums. So let's pick apart a couple of the drum sounds you'll be listening to. The first is the kick drum. It's the large drum that sits on the ground and will sometimes say the band name or something on it's face. The kick drum, also called the bass drum, creates the low sounding boom. Listen to it here:

The next drum part to listen to is the snare drum. It sounds snappy and bright. If you think about the "Little Drummer Boy," a military drum roll, or a school fight song you probably have the right sounding drum in mind. Here's a sample for you to listen to:

As we talked about last lesson, most music is grouped into four beats. So that you'd count "1,2,3,4" and start again back at 1. The snare drum is most often found on beats 2 and 4 and the kick is commonly on beats 1 and 3. Listen to this next clip to hear it. I play the pattern four times (counting to 4, four times), but I didn't count the first four beats out loud.

Here's the same pattern again, but without me counting along. See if you can count with it.

How did you do? Did you remember to count "1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4" and not "1 ,2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8?" The other thing to make sure is that your counting is steady. If every song used this drum pattern it would make finding beats very easy, but very boring to listen to. So, there are plenty of songs that don't use this exact pattern. But it's a good place to start. Most rock or pop songs at least have the snare happening on every fourth beat. So if you can't make out all the parts but hear the snare happening regularly but only every so often, it's a good bet that's beat 4.

Now here's an example using a real song. The first example is for you to practice counting yourself. The second example has me counting with it so you can check how you did.

Now here's a second example. This one actually starts out with a muted guitar stroke, and it is playing the beat for you. If you crank the volume and listen very carefully you can actually hear someone say "four" on beat four right before the guitar hits the first chord. There's a part where the drums and guitar change up the rhythm and it can be very difficult to get the counting during that part. Just try to feel the beat and pretend the drums never changed.

I hope that helps you start to pick out the beat when listening to your favorite songs. For more practice AC/DC is a very good band to start with. Their drum parts are normally very easy to pick out.

Click here to go to the next lesson: The Basic Notes Used in Rhythm.

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