Fulcrum Drum Exercises on a Marching Snare Drum

Video Transcript

"This video lesson is going to be discussing the fulcrum exercise. This is to make sure that we’re allowing the stick to travel in the same path with the same relaxed motion every single time. It’s also to get us to get used to how to rebound out of the head in a relaxed manner. I’ll show you this exercise off the right hand, and then I will also explain it off the left. Right hand, the exercise is going to start with just our front fulcrum. We’re just going to play strokes off of our front fulcrum, only holding from here like so. Notice, the stick isn’t stopping at any point in time, it’s in continuous fluid motion. The next thing you would do would be to add your middle finger. I’m going to start here and generally, I’m just going to slowly add middle finger, index finger, ring finger, and pinky finger, like so. Now, here is the very, very important part. The next section of the fulcrum exercise is going from an open palm to closing it in to where my back fulcrum is engaged. This is a very, very important part of this exercise. What we want to have happen is for this and this to feel the same. Generally, what students do is as soon as they pull it in, they hold on and they squeeze the stick to where the stroke looks like…We don’t want that. We want to have the same exact stroke from here to here. Let me demonstrate that for you. Same things hold true off of out left hand. Our left hand is a little bit more difficult in the long run, because we add the front fulcrum right away. We’re going to start with just out back fulcrum engaged. Now, a good thing to practice here to get our left hand stroke ready to go is playing rim shots with your thumb, rotating to flat to all the away turned over. That’s going to get us the general motion of our left stroke. Now, we’re going to start with just the back fulcrum, rotate, and play nice relaxed strokes. Then what you’re going to see me do is add my front fulcrum system right away, then the middle finger, then I’m going to engage the bottom two fingers. Like I said, this one is pretty tough, because right away you’re going from just a completely relaxed back fulcrum to straight away on your front fulcrum. Let me demonstrate this exercise for you. General pitfall is again, as soon as you engage this front fulcrum to be playing more to be playing more tightly or into the head and less relaxed, like so. This is not the way we should be playing. You want to make sure that this and this feel the same. Please check out our next video, we’ll be discussing eight on hand."