Tango Drum Beat
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Learn How To Play The Tango Latin Drum Beat!
The tango is a very gracious, elegant, beautiful style of music from Argentina. It isn't terribly difficult to play, because most of the time it's played slowly. There aren't a lot of fast tangos out there. In the examples I've given, there are four different rudiments that we can use. They don't have to be all that complicated, but if want to add a little variety to your tango, you can play flams, drags, five stroke rolls (which are usually a must), or a nine stroke roll.
You already know what a flam is from that video. I want to quickly show you what a drag is, in case you aren't sure. A drag is another drum rudiment. It can also be called a ruff. It is the same concept as a flam, except you are going to have two little ghost notes before your main note. For the exercises that incorporate the drag, you may need to practice a bit.
In a tango, you are going to want to throw in that little buzz roll at the end almost every time. What it is, is a five stroke roll that begins on the end of four. A five stroke rolls is played with two sets of doubles followed by a single. If the five stroke roll isn't a rudiment that you are familiar with, you may need to practice that a bit before trying the exercises.
Another rudiment I show is a nine stroke roll. As you can guess, there are nine strokes in a nine stroke roll. The nine stroke roll starts on beat four and consists of four sets of doubles followed by one single. So you'll need to practice your nine stroke rolls in order to get that working properly. After you get the exercises down, we have a great play-a-long that will give you a further understanding of this great style of music.
Exercise 1 uses the five stroke roll. You'll see it notated in the second eighth note of beat four.
Exercise 2 adds in some flams to the pattern on beats two, three and four.
Exercise 3 and 4 use the same concepts as one and two, only this time a nine-stroke roll is played at the beginning of beat four.
Exercises 5 and 6 are the same as exercises two and four, but they use drags in place of the flams.
Learn how to play the songo Latin beat in the next drum lesson.
