How to Play Snare Drum

The following concepts will minimize the barriers on your snare drum chops, creating greater potential for stamina, speed, and power in anything played with drumsticks. Efficient snare drum technique (or drum stick technique in general) will be the result of applying these concepts.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Sticks and a snare drum (or other similar playing surface)

1. Fundamentally, there are only 2 things that can happen to the drumstick when it hits the snare drum. Any guesses? It can either REBOUND, or NOT REBOUND. So what? Every musical output you create stems from these inputs. By mastering the inputs, the outputs take care of themselves. Good technique means having good inputs.
   
   Efficiency in anything can be defined as using fewer inputs to get equal or greater outputs.

2. So how do you know when to utilize the rebound and when to restrict it? The dynamics of the musical phrase will be your guide (the term "dynamics" is just a fancy way of saying "volume levels").
   
   EXAMPLE 1) When the latter note is GREATER OR EQUAL in volume to the former, 100% of the possible rebound of the stick should be utilized.
   
   EXAMPLE 2) When the latter note is LESS in volume than the former, the rebound should be restricted (to a degree proportional to the amount of volume reduction).
   
   Try doing the opposite for each example. You should notice how much extra physical work it takes.
   
   Volume comes from velocity, velocity comes from stick height (at a set tempo), and stick height comes from the utilization or restriction of REBOUND (when ignoring lift from an UPSTROKE, mentioned later). Your ability to rebound effectively can therefore affect your "dynamic" output in certain musical situations.

3. So you understand WHEN there should be rebound or not, but HOW should you make it happen?
   
   Restricting rebound: rather than squeezing on the stick (more work), simply grip it so that there aren't any gaps of air between the stick and your palm and fingers. The mass of the bones and muscles in your arms will passively absorb the shock.
   
   [Note this technique is only necessary for this situation. The stick should come out of contact with the palm (but stay in contact with the fingers) when the notes are rebounding. Otherwise rebound could never happen since the fulcrum point wouldn't exist.]
   
   Utilizing rebound: Gripping the stick in the wrong place can keep it from bouncing well. To figure out where the sweet spot is, take the stick with your thumb and index finger and let it fall to the drum (while maintaing the lightest possible grip on the stick). Try this on different parts on the stick, and you will notice a varying number of resulting bounces. Once you find the spot with the most bounces, bring the rest of your hand around the stick for a complete grip.
   
   Another pointer is to keep the top part of your hand (between your wrist and knuckles of the index and middle fingers) more or less parallel to the drum. This allows your wrist to follow the motions of the rebounding stick, thus preventing a limited degree of rebound.
   
   Also be sure to strike the playing surface at as close to a 90 degree angle as possible. Otherwise your muscles will have to generate lift that resulting misdirected rebound won't.

4. There is one other thing that can happen to a stick in the normal course of playing. I didn't mention it earlier because technically it's not a result of hitting the drum.
   
   It's the UPSTROKE. It happens when the latter note is GREATER in volume to the former note. It compensates for the lift that the laws of physics won't allow the rebound to generate. You still use 100% of the rebound in this situation, but 100% just isn't enough to get you where you need to be. I'm not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure anything greater than a 100% transfer of energy is impossible (at least based on humanity's current understanding of nature).
   
   This is a motion that needs to become very rapid and powerful. Otherwise loud rolls and quick accent patterns will prove difficult.
   
   To develop this, play accent/tap exercises. When going from tap to accent, pretend your drum is flubber. This gets you in the mindset of engaging an upstroke as quickly and powerfully as possible.

5. Go learn new rudiments and re-learn old rudiments in terms of what each drumstick plays individually. Once you figure out the rhythms and motions of each isolated hand, apply everything you just learned in order to prove to yourself that you're playing that rudiment efficiently. If you notice any difference in what one hand does when the other hand is added back in to complete the rudiment, then that rudiment still needs practice until the inefficiencies are eliminated.
   
   The depth of understanding you gain from this will allow you to physically FEEL if you are playing something correctly, regardless of what it sounds like. "By mastering the inputs, the outputs take care of themselves." Remember that from earlier? This is exactly what that sentence means.

Tips & Warnings

• Keep in mind that all these tips refer to what ONE HAND is doing with its stick. Obviously, snare drumming doesn't always happen on one hand. Just take these tips and apply them to what each hand does individually to get the intended results. It will take a lot of thought and possible re-learning of previous habits, but it will get the "dirt out of your engine" so you'll have better "gas mileage" so to speak. I think it's a wiser alternative to simply adding more "gas" and risking muscle strain, tendonitis, and/or carpal tunnel syndrome.
• Realize that no matter what you do on the drums (or in life), whether performing, improvising, or practicing, you are REHEARSING. Rehearsing increases your tendency of doing what you rehearse AUTOMATICALLY without much effort. Every action you take, consciously or otherwise, increases your chances of performing that action subconsciously. The more you rehearse good habits consciously, the more likely they are to happen subconsciously in the future. The only "downside" is that bad habits will eventually take more effort.
• In short, be consciously aware of some specific factor (timing, rebound utilization, dynamic/stick height control) to improve upon in every exercise, lick, beat, etc. that you rehearse. That's the only way for good technique to become second nature when you perform or improvise. Otherwise you risk developing bad habits and delaying your development.