Pitfalls of 8-on-a-Hand Drum Exercise on a Marching Snare Drum

Video Transcript

"This video lesson is going to be discussing two pitfalls, two of the four pitfalls, of eight on a hand. Eight on a hand is an exercise that is just written as exactly as it sounds. It’s eight strokes off the right hand, then going straight and eight stokes of the left. The first pitfall of eight on a hand is internal hand timing. Now, what I mean by that is making sure that you’re playing exact eight notes versus slowing down or speeding up while internally playing eight strokes off your right. Playing it wrong or poorly would sound something like this. Notice that I sped up by the third stroke. Another example would be…General tendency is when you’re playing fast to slow down the last half of each hand. Internal hand timing means making sure that every stroke is exactly in time. The next pitfall is hand to hand timing. That happens between stroke eight off the right and stroke one off the left or vice versa. Now, what generally tends to happen is a student will condense too much the space between eight and one. It would sound something like this. Now that’s not what we want. We want to make sure between eight and one is an exact eighth note so that it sounds completely fluid from hand to hand. Does that make sense? Please check out our next video, we’ll be discussing the next two pitfalls of eight on a hand."