The snare drum roll is one of the most difficult rudiments on the snare drum. The concept of the roll is easy. The difficulty comes with the execution. Over the past several videos, I have illustrated different strategies for improving the roll. I have found that over the years, I like to vary the exercises that I use to strengthen and improve my rolls. Here are two exercises that are guaranteed to help you develop your rolls. Download the PDF, get out your drum and roll.
Over the past couple of months, I have been introducing snare drum rudiments. For the percussionist, rudiments are like scales. You should be practicing them everyday just like a wind player practices scales. In today’s video, I would like to introduce my snare drum warm-up that I wrote a year ago. This 12 minute warm-up includes all of the basic strokes to give you a well rounded warm-up. Please download a copy of my snare drum warm-up, get out your practice pad, a metronome and go for it. (more…)
A couple of months ago, I introduced a new Snare Drum Roll Exercise. I hope this has helped develop your roll technique.
In the past couple of episodes of my videos, I have begun to talk about the bounced stroke. For most students, this is the most difficult rudiment on the snare drum. If you don’t believe me, go to a high school band concert. I find most students push too hard and don’t allow the stick to do most of the work.
In this exercise sheet, I have created an additive process exercise that starts with one bounce on a note and adds one bounced stroke per line. In the first measure, the foundation is introduced followed by the bounced stroke in the second measure. One of the goals was to make sure to that both hands were working on the bounced strokes.
In this episode, we continue with the flam rudiments and introduce the flam tap and the flam accent. Be sure you execute the flam properly before diving into these new rudiments. For a complete list of rudiments, click here.
In September, I shared my updated snare drum warm-up. It was my hope to start the conversation about creating a unified warm-up that hit all the basic building blocks on snare drum in a 10-15 minutes. I would love to hear if anyone has been using it and if it has worked. I found over the past 6 months, that it has helped me focus and prepare for my practice session along with getting me warm.
I also feel that while I enjoy using the warm-up I needed a metronome to keep me honest and continue to push me. So, I decided to program my metronome with the different lines so I could be more effective in my execution of the warm-up. (I have written before about my favorite metronome app for the iPhone. Tempo Advanced is a killer app and is the best $2 you will ever spend. It is now available on iPhone and Android and has recently been updated to include polyrhythms. More about that in a future article). I programmed each line of the warm-up into Tempo Advanced and created a set list that progresses through the entire sheet. I wanted to figure out a way to share this everyone and it wasn’t until last night (when I found Reflector) that I was able to record my iPad screen. I uploaded the video to YouTube and now anyone can use this video to practice with the sheet music. In the future, I would like to program it at different tempos. Before I do that, I would like some feedback from you. Let me know what you think. Does it work for you? Is there anything I should change?
