Three Ways to Improve Your Snare Drum Facility
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Ah, yes. The snare drum, my first musical love. It was the first instrument to really grab my attention and it totally pushed me over the edge after watching the local high school drumline play. Little did I know that eventually, I would play that instrument for nearly a decade in many contexts like high school drumline, a drum corps audition, College Marching Band, Concert Band, and more.
While I really love snare drumming, I am certainly not an expert. There are plenty of people who are way better than I am, but over the years I have received some incredible advice from these same people that have truly helped me on my journey to being a better snare drummer. Here are three of my favorite examples.
Play Everything Soft
That’s right. Everything! I got this advice from an amazing Virtual Masterclass with Jacob Nissly. In order to develop his soft playing, which is often the bane of concert snare drummers, he plays difficult, loud music at pianissimo. For example, he plays things like 14 Modern Concert Solos by John Pratt and The All-American Drummer by Charley Wilcoxen at extremely soft volumes to work on the Lt. Kije excerpt. His thought process is that if you can play all the Pratt solos, you won’t break a sweat when playing Lt. Kije.
After hearing about this I started implementing this in different ways. For example, I would play the entirety of an etude from Delecluse’s Douze Etudes at pianissimo, and gradually raising the upper dynamic levels session after session until I was playing it as written.
Create a Custom Snare Drum Warm-up
Being a drumline kid, I usually would play at least a small warmup before spending the bulk of my practice time learning repertoire. However, as I went through my undergraduate degree I started using warm-ups less and less until eventually, I would dive straight into rep. However, after talking to some grad students at USC they recommended I use a warm-up that was written by Dr. John Parks IV at FSU in combination with Stick Control by George Lawrence Stone.
After using this warm-up for just a week, my hands started feeling much more secure when working on rep, which ultimately increased my efficiency. Once you find a warm-up that works for you, start customizing it to fit your needs. For example, my buzz rolls were deficient compared to other areas of my playing, so I increased the time I spent on that and decreased the time spent on stuff I was good at like double-stroke rolls.
While every person is different, I settled into a routine where I would start my day by warming up on snare drum before playing anything else for about 30-45 minutes. This foundational work not only helped my snare drum playing, but I found it helped other aspects of my percussion playing, like marimba and xylophone. Below is the warm-up routine I used during my undergraduate. Please feel free to download and customize for yourself!
Use Primers
I first saw this being used by an amazing Drum Corps drumline. What they would do is find their most difficult small chunk of music and isolate it in various ways. First, they would play a skeleton/deconstructed version of the chunk and gradually add things until eventually, they were playing the chunk as written. Below is an example from an old drumline cadence called Overheat I wrote:
My favorite way to implement this is to find hard examples in your piece and right after warming up, dedicate the first portion of your practice to using primers. This allowed for my workflow to be consistent through my practice routine, not having to stop to figure out a technical challenge.
Try it out!
Using these three tips has been a great help for me on my journey to being a better snare drummer. I hope that you also find the same value!
If you are looking for ways to improve your next practice session check out my blog post here. I go into detail on five of my favorite pieces of advice to improve effectiveness in the practice room.
Happy Practicing!
