How to Play a Rim Hit on a Snare

Video Transcript

"JOEL SIEGEL: One additional aspect of playing on a snare drum that I want to address is your rim click. We talked about the click like that, so it's kinda tough. There's not really a good vocabulary set up for the difference between this, a rim click, and this, a rim hit. Anyway, this is what I want to talk about. You're going to want to either--you can position pretty much wherever is natural for you. If you're on a small setup like this and you don't have a tom, then you can just do your rim click out here in front of you with a nice tinny sound if that's what you're going for. You can also do it back here at the other end of the snare drum. This is mostly a matter of comfort. The last part you can do it--leaving out the floor tom, you can also play on the rim of the floor tom, you can play the rim of the base drum. This is just going to come in handy when you're looking for extra textures, something like a small sound, a trickling sound depending on what the music calls for. So, use it at your discretion. You can also hear that these are different sounds that are being evoked from the rim of the snare drum versus the rim of the bass drum and you're going to find the same is true for your floor tom or even your rack toms."