How to Play the Snare Drum

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Lennon Leppert, and on behalf of Expert Village, this is "How to Play the Snare Drum". The snare drum, to a lot of people, is known as a rock instrument. It's one of the most important drums on the drum set. But as far as orchestral playing goes, it has a lot of different elements that come into play, different styles of playing, techniques, and as far as marching band goes, totally different ballpark of how to play, styles. The first thing is that a lot of people are used to seeing drummers drum traditional style, which is, you hold the left stick like so, and the right stick normal, and you play like this. And this came from when Fife and Drum bands in the military would play, they would play side drums, and so it was easier to use your sticks like that, you really couldn't play like that. Then, as jazz came around, rock, a lot of drummers shunned that and started playing more contemporary style holding both sticks the same way. Both ways basically get essentially the same sound. There are a few different kinds of sticks to use on a snare drum, a few different effects. The first are more traditional concert snare sticks, they're heavier, thicker, and usually always wood sticks, get a heavier sound, more for orchestral playing. The next are brushes, you can use brushes. For jazz effects or even in orchestral music, it calls for brushes a lot of times. And you can scrape the head of the snare drum like so for a jazz effect. You can use bamboo shoot sticks, they're not quite as soft as brushes, not quite as hard as sticks, can't really scrape as well. Or, you can use mallets, usually timpani mallets work best. And a lot of times they'll ask you to flip the snare off for a tom tom effect, and it gets that kind of a sound, you can play with sticks too. That concludes "How to Play a Snare Drum"."