How To Play The Snare Drum

Today’s lesson is about how to play the snare drum. In particular we’re going to talk about how to play a snare drum in context with a groove. Let’s not forget though to spend some time as drummers, practising rudiments, single strokes, double strokes, all these kind of sticking exercises in order to get a sense of articulation and to develop speed, control and dynamic contrast, which will enhance your playing across the board. Some things to think about are the different surface areas of the drum. You should be able to hear that as I move around the drum from the outside to the centre you will get different tones. There’s a lot of colour to be had there, big rim shots, accents, all those would count as dynamic contrast. It’s important to remain event fluid motion and a relaxed posture, sitting up straight when playing the drums so you can create a good tone and fluid time. One of the things that’s really important when playing is maintaining a consistent backbeat and by the backbeat I mean the two and four. So if we take a basic backbeat pattern, what we want is that backbeat to be really solid and strong, because that’s what everything else swings off. Once we get that together we can create contrast by perhaps adding ghost notes. By doing that we’re getting two different volumes and two different tones. If I take the tempo up a little bit we start to get different tones out of the drum. Earlier I mentioned rim shots. The best way to produce a rim shot is to aim for the centre of the drum and hit the rim and the drumhead at the same time. You want to practice doing this as consistently as possible. You do not need to swing from over your head to do it, you do not need to hit the drum any harder, it’s just a matter of getting the angle right. It’s actually quite an easy thing to do, what most drummers do is they spend quite a lot of time putting a lot more weight into the backbeat, which actually tends to interrupt the time flow and I would highly recommend you actually spend some time practicing playing those notes at a low height so we can play it at different dynamic levels. Here’s a good example of how to play ghost notes and rim shots in context. To recap, consistency is the key thing, particularly while playing backbeats. Be aware of motion, sound and dynamic contrast.