Independence For Multiple Instruments

Zendrums can easily be used to simulate more than 1 instrument at a time. A drum kit is often one of those instruments. Latin percussion, samples, bass lines and various instrumental accents might be used else where. Once you have perfected a 1 handed groove, its time to teach that other hand some new tricks.

It is very easy, and pretty effective, to simply tap a cow bell/guiro combination on 2 & 4, and add a nice layer of spice to a standard 4/4 rhythm.

However, wouldn't it be nice if that other player (other hand) happened to be playing something fairly independent and not simply sounding like a layered sound?

Polyrhythm.

That's right, have your groove in 4/4 cycles, and a percussive overlay in 3 or 5. Here's the exercise to get your brain and fingers used to the idea:

With your left hand, play the 5 pads down the left of the instrument, 1 per quarter note, top to bottom. With the right hand, cycle four pads on the tail end of the Zen', 1 per quarter note. After a hand runs out of pads, move it back to the top.

	Beat	Left Hand	Right Hand
	1	L1	R1
	2	L2	R2
	3	L3	R3
	4	L4	R4
	1	L5	R1
	2	L1	R2
	3	L2	R3
	4	L3	R4

And so on. Now if the right hand were grooving in 4, and the left wasn't just doing quarters, but something like 2 eights on clave, a high conga, 2 eights on low conga, a cowbell and 2 eights on timbale, you start getting the idea of just what can be going on. A walking blues bassline isn't that far behind...