Set Position & Body Posture on a Marching Snare Drum

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is John Antonelli with Expert Village. This video is going to talk about the set position and body posture. First of all, I find it very important to talk about the body posture so that when a student plays the drum, they don’t do with a poor quality of sound. Body posture begins from the legs all the way down to the floor. They should be in a straight line with your spine all the way up to your neck. The next part is your shoulders. The shoulders are a very, very important part of how to play this drum. We don’t want to be hunched over and more than likely use too much arm in stabbing the drum. We also don’t want to pulled too far back and affect our sound quality that way. An exercise I do daily in order to improve my body posture is rolling my shoulders all the way forward, rolling them all the way back, and then relaxing them to where my chest is still projecting out but my shoulders are not pulled back or pulled forward. The next thing we want to talk about posture wise is our abs. We want to make sure that they’re relaxed but still separated from our lower body to where they’re stretched. We want to be as tall as we can so when we’re marching, we can be as fluid as we can be. The next thing we want to talk about is the set position, and that’s how to hold the sticks when you’re at the set, when your instructor calls you to set. This is done by holding the sticks like you normally would. Left hand back fulcrum, left hand front fulcrum, right hand fulcrums, front, and back. The important part here is to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for the correct stick angle, which we’ll discuss later into the drum. This is going to be done by resting our left third knuckle of our pinky on the rim of the drum, not resting lazily, but still resting barely touching. The next thing we want to do is just a one time middle finger test on our right hand to make sure that we’re not here lazy, or here overly intense. So nice, even 100% straight sticks with even fulcrums. That’s the set position. Check out our next video where we will be talking about the right hand stroke. "