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

Video Transcript

"This video lesson is going to be about the last two pitfalls of eight on a hand. These are accents. Eight on a hand should sound exactly like eighth notes continuously from right hand to left. Now generally, students will accent certain notes during eight on a hand and they’ll stick out and be of a different sound quality and a different sound. This is not what we want. Generally, the accents happen on first of all, the very fist note of each hand. It sounds something like this. That is not what we want. That is not what we want. What we want is making sure that strokes one and stroke two sound exactly the same versus… same thing goes off the left hand. The next accent that students tend to put is the last stroke on the other hand. This is because they think about stopping the stick and squeezing the stick on stroke eight. This is not what we want. What this would sound like would be. Now you could hear I accented by squeezing the stick, I got a different sound. That’s not what we want. We want to make sure that eight strokes all sound exactly the same. Make sense? In order to do that we must use what’s called a cushion stroke. Please stick around and check out our next video where I will be discussing the cushion stoke."