Steve Berman from Phoenix, Arizona, left the below comment on the YouTube video you’ll find at the bottom of this blog post. Many thanks, Steve!
I naively thought that I might have come up with the idea of pad drumming about 3 years ago, but then Googled a bit and ended up finding this same course by mentioned here, XpressPads. You’re totally right about the constant alternation of hands being what makes it unique and eventually click. As a drummer it only took me a day to get what you’re outlining in your video, and even a friend of mine who couldn’t play a real kit to save his life (but hears drum sounds and understands the underlying theory) picked up some stuff shockingly fast. Until I understood that everything needed to have that backbone of RLRLRLRL hand alternation, everything I did was clunky and for “quantized-use only,” like using my right hand to keep 16th notes on the hat and my left to add in a kick and snare. Getting anything going that wasn’t a simple hip-hop/rap type beat was impossible as well – without alternating the hands I found a huge brick wall very very quickly on what I could play, even though I could play any genre quite well on a real kit.
While there might be some other materials out there on pad drumming, this to me is THE system and by far the most intuitive, and I’m glad to see it getting its fair props on a channel like yours. There’s probably going to be some interesting opportunities for “expert” level pad drummers who can play live as time goes on and we move more and more towards digital sounds and whatnot. EZDrummer2 and similar programs sound just like real kits when the touch response is used with skill, and the ability to have a perfect-sounding, plug and play drumkit that could be used in a live or studio situation via an MPD218 or two is quite interesting, I’d think. Programmed drum tracks can have real feel, inflection, and probably go toe-to-toe with the real thing.
Really long comment, but seeing this video has inspired me to fire up the program and make a run through the coursework again. I’m curious – do you use anything like an EZDrummer2 and the pad stuff for in-studio drum tracking, either as demo/scratch track work to be replaced later, or on actual tracks (with non-electronic sounds)?