Pitfalls of the 8th Note Bucks Drum Exercise on a Marching Snare Drum

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m John Antonelli on behalf of Expert Village. In the previous lesson, we discussed how to construct an exercise called eight note bucks. In this lesson, we’ll discuss the pitfalls of eight note bucks. There are a couple major pitfalls. One is timing, making sure that your cushioning from the 12 inch stroke to the 3 inch stroke versus squeezing down to 1 inch, bringing it back up to 3, and then playing. What’s going to happen there is you’re going to be late because you have extra motion versus just cushioning the 3 and playing from 3. That’s going to be more fluid, more relaxed, you’re going to get a better sound, and you’re going to stay in time. The next pitfall, lies still in timing but is in the timing of the 16th note bar. What I recommend a person to do is break this exercise down into actual three parts to where they just play the right hand alone, then they add the left hand 16 notes on the rim to where they can still concentrate on the consistent eight note and still here the 16th note check in the next bar. Then in the following bar, move the left hand back in to where you hear everything on the drum. Now, that is going to be maintaining consistent 16th note timing. You can check yourself. If you’re squeezing the stick, it’s going to sound like…versus…it’s constant 16th notes. Do the same breakdown of the left hand. The next pitfall is going to be talking about heights. What generally tends to happen is a player will underplay the 16th note hand, or lets just break it down the left hand. It will sound something like this…versus…actually having a consistent 3 inch height from right hand to left hand. Those are the major pitfalls of the eighth note bucks. Please check out our next video where we will be discussing how to construct an exercise I call triplet bucks. "