🥁 Snare drum challenge

Hey fellow drummers!

Coming up this week…

• Give your snare some (more) attention and challenge yourself as we talk about a couple of snare drum pieces 🥁 

• Get some ideas from our TODO list ✅ 

• Construct a 3D model of a drum kit online 🖥️ 

• Get inspired by Carter McLean’s brewery gig 🍺 

• Check out our top 5 YouTube videos 📺️ 

I want to talk a bit about a couple of snare drum pieces. 🥁 

I’ve recently been working on “The New Downfall” from Charley Wilcoxon’s book “Modern Rudimental Swing Solos: For the Advanced Drummer“.

It has some tricky little sections in it, but has been a lot of fun to study so far.

You can always slow down YouTube videos in order to get at the details, but here’s an example played at a slightly lower tempo.

In the past, I’ve also studied a lovely Swiss piece called “Radac Tagwacht”, that is apparently a good example of the Basel drumming style.

Claus Hessler is all over this, so he is your man if you are looking for info around this style of drumming and this piece in particular.

If memory serves me, Radac Tagwacht and similar were used at various times in the Swiss Military with different meanings, for example as calls to breakfast or lunch. I really need to order and read Claus’ book “Camp Duty Update” which talks about this fascinating subject.

Up for the challenge?

Whenever I spend time studying snare drum pieces, I always find them a fun challenge with the added benefit of really improving my hands.

If you want to give these pieces a try, Radac can be found online as a pdf and the Wilcoxon solo is available in his book.

These pieces are probably more in the ballpark of advanced players, but if you don’t put yourself in that category, don’t be put off. There’s a lot to learn from studying these regardless, and they sound very nice played slowly too!

Tips

• Start as slow as you are comfortable with, and if you can “just about manage” some sections at a given tempo, slow it down and get the notes comfortable before increasing the tempo again. Don’t settle for “sloppy” as it will be detrimental in the long run.

• Break and loop down sections. There’s some really tricky bits of vocabulary in there. Sometimes the tricky bits don’t naturally resolve to the same hand i.e. you may find something you want to work on will start and finish with your right or left hand, meaning it doesn’t “loop” naturally. In that case, I normally just try to incorporate the next bar to get it to loop, or add my own bar to get me back to the start.

• Observe dynamics. These pieces are full of dynamics; not just accents and taps, but low and high flams etc. Respect them and spend the time getting these right.

• Relax your hands and keep a loose grip. If you find you are “digging in” or your hands start to hurt, then you need to slow down until that doesn’t happen.

• Ensure left and right have the same dynamic range. What does that mean? Well, if you’re right handed and can play soft to loud without any problems, make sure you can do the same on your left. Again - don’t accept sloppy playing!

✅ Service your gear. Check the condition of everything, replace parts where necessary or even just strip the lugs, add some lube and re-tune. Remember that heads stretch over time and become less resonant - replacing them can make a huge difference. Are your reso heads due a replacement?

✅ Practice your tuning. Play with different head tensions and tunings, and experiment with how different combinations can sound. Are you missing out on your ideal sound? There’s no silver bullet - every drum has it’s preferred tuning. Refer to The Drum Tuning Bible for tips.

✅ Refresh your environment. Tidy things up. Re-organise. Display your books. Re-jig your layout. Get inspired!

✅ Dust off an old book. That music book you bought ages ago that lives near the bottom of the pile? There’s probably gold in it. Dust it off and spend some time with it.

Want to make a 3D model of your drums? Looking to design a new kit? All of your dreams can come true with “Drumstructor”! **

** all of your dreams may not come true

I love this from Carter McLean, he’s got amazing groove and such a relaxed style!

I was watching and wondering if the folks at the brewery had any idea of the level of talent they were watching on stage from all of the musicians (someone does also raise this point in the comments).