How to Play Stir Accents on Drums

Video Transcript

"JOEL SIEGEL: Now when you're stirring the soup with the brushes, you'd either be doing--typically you'll be creating that ambience and so you'll have just kind of this kind of timeless wash and that's this sound. Or you'll be--a lot of times you'll be playing jazz and you'll be basically charged with keeping 2 and 4 in jazz. If you're playing a 4-4, either a swing or even when it's straight, basically the charge of the drummer is keep time and the way that you do that is by accenting 2 and 4. So I just want to discuss real quick accenting 2 and 4 with that while you're stirring the soup. So you're not actually even going to leave the drum head, but you are going to hear those accents of 2 and 4. So here's what it should sound like. Just to clarify, here's the count, one, two, one, two, three, four. You can see I'm achieving that accent by kind of a quick swipe. This is going to be difficult at first, but the more you do brushwork--and again, I encourage you to work a lot on it--the more ability you'll have to get that finesse and that nuance. It's just kind of in the wrist and a little bit of a flick of the forearm."