Drum Central - Sepultura Groove Drum lesson - Eloy Casagrande

Hello and welcome back to the Drum Central YouTube channel. My name is Roman Bumbrough and I'm coming at you from the brand new Drum Central studio. We're really excited about this because for the first time we've got our own studio at the drum shop in Edinburgh, which is, you know, it means that we can do lots more video lessons, which is what we're doing today. We can do product demos, we've got a Yamaha video with Kyle and, you know, there's going to be a lot more content coming from straight from the shop, which we're all really excited about. In today's video though we're doing a drum lesson and we're doing a groove from Sepultura's song Manipulation of Tragedy. Now I first heard this song through a drum playthrough by the drummer of Sepultura, Eloy Casagrande, which, you know, if you've never heard of him you need to check him out. He is an absolute beast. He hits his drums and cymbals so hard but he still has so much finesse and accuracy in his playing and I recommend you actually watch the playthrough video of that song because the entire thing is insane and I've only taken, you know, a couple of bars from the song that I can actually play. The rest of it I can't play. But yeah, this guy is amazing, this band is really cool and this groove is actually, you know, it sounds really complicated. You probably heard it at the start of the video and you're thinking how do we play this? When you break it down it's actually quite simple. So what we're going to do is we're just going to break down the hands first and then the feet as well. In terms of this groove what we're actually playing is just a paradiddle. The paradiddle hand pattern is of course right left right right left right left left and that is all we're playing for that entire groove. What makes this interesting though is the orchestration of these hands around the kit. We'll come to that in a second. We're just going to talk about the feet as well. So for the feet, again, it's not too complicated. All we're doing is single stroke rolls just played as 16th notes. So our hands and feet are playing the same subdivisions. We're just 16th notes the entire time. We're just playing single strokes on the feet and paradiddles on the hands, starting with our right hand. Before you start playing that groove around the kit, what I recommend is just playing 16th notes in the bass drum and then playing your paradiddle 16th notes on the hands just on the snare drum without moving around the kit. And what you want to listen for is that your hands and your feet are totally in sync and there's no flamming. You know, when you strike your snare drum there's a bass drum playing at the exact same time and it's all totally locked in. And that's the secret to making this groove sound so tight and so complicated as well. Once you've got that down, we can start to move our hands around the kit. So like I said, it's just a paradiddle. Right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left. And once again, we only have two patterns in terms of the actual orchestration. So our first pattern is our right hand on the hi-hat, our left hand on the first tom, two right hands on the floor tom, a backbeat on the snare drum with the left, right hand onto the hi-hat again, and then two ghosted notes on the snare drum again. Here that is really slowly, and here it is at 100 bpm. And again, look out for those dynamics on the snare drum. You want to have the nice backbeat on the snare but also have those two nice ghost notes at the end of that phrase as well. And we just play that pattern three times round. And then we have our second pattern, which again is just a paradiddle, but we're just splitting our hands between the bell of the right cymbal on our right hand and the snare on our left hand. And we're just playing right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left. The cool thing about this pattern is our single left hands on the snare drum, they're kind of accented, and then the double at the end is ghosted again. You get cool syncopation on the snare drum there. And all you have to do is put those two patterns together. And like I said, you're just playing paradiddles the entire time, so once you've got the paradiddles down and you've got the orchestration down, this shouldn't be too hard. So I recommend practicing that and looping that round without the bass drum and just get that hand pattern down. And once you're happy with that, you can once again add your bass drum in. So we're just playing that constantly on every note, 16th notes. So here's how the groove sounds at around 100 bpm. And the original tempo is around 140 bpm, so if you're practicing it, aim for around there. And that is it! So it sounds very complicated, but like I said, it's all just paradiddles and it's all just single stroke rolls on the bass drum. So when you break it down like that, it's not actually too intimidating. And he uses that pattern quite a bit. He changes the orchestration a lot in the song, but the actual pattern itself in the verses is very similar to that. Now I just want to point out that Eloy is using a X hi-hat in his video, so he's using X hat like this. Now you can play this groove with a normal hi-hat pedal, a hi-hat stand sorry, but it will involve a bit of crossover, so it can be a bit more hard. So I do recommend getting an X hat because it can really help clean that groove. It makes it easier for that initial right left on the tom. Because if you did it with a normal hi-hat over here, you're kind of crossing over your hands and it can be a bit janky. What I'm using today is just a Mino MXH X hat stand. But yeah, that is it for this lesson. Hope you enjoyed. Sorry it's been so long. The Covid kind of put a spanner in the works in terms of our video production because I live slightly outside of the city and it was hard for me to get in and obviously the restrictions and stuff made it quite difficult. But we're really excited to be back and yeah, look out for more videos from us. Cheers!