Hand stuff. Pad stuff. Old snare drum made pretty again.

A few weeks ago, I was in California, taking a vacation with my girlfriend Nicole, and also visiting my grandparents. During this trip, I put together and wrote my first and previous blog post, about the construction of my drum practice shed. While out in California, I obviously had no set of drums to practice on, only my trusty pad. So, while in the process of publishing my first post, I stumbled upon an idea for my next post: pad/hand stuff! Woo! The drum that I'm playing on in the videos below is a cool old WFL snare I fixed up. If the badge dates on this page are accurate, then my snare was made between 1948 and 1952.

I got this snare for super cheap at a thrift store when I was in high school, and forgot about until sometime last year, when I decided to make it playable again. The snare had been painted with some sort of flat house paint, and my first task was to strip that stuff off. To my surprise, as I was peeling and scraping to old paint off, I discovered the awesome white pearl finish underneath! Unfortunately, It was too damaged to keep, and I peeled and scraped that off as well, down to the bare wood. I ordered a new wrap, the closest thing I could find to the original, which was this beautiful white pearl finish from
 Jammin' Sam drum wraps. The original hoops were in poor shape and out of round, so I ordered some stock Gibraltar triple flange hoops, and some new 12 strand Puresound snare wires. When I bought the snare, it had no throw off, so I searched and successfully found a period appropriate, 1950s nickel throw off, with WFL engraved on it. I polished the remaining original hardware, put a fiberskyn on top, and it sounds and looks great!

 I don't have a vast array of pad exercises that I work on, it's basically the same few things repeated ad nauseam. My basic warm up routine, that I begin most of my practice sessions with, is as follows.


1) Free strokes. I set my metronome around 55-60 bpm, and play through the first column of page 5 of "Stick Control", so that the 8th note=55-60. The physical mechanism behind this motion is explained well by Jojo Mayer in his DVD (in the chapter titled "Gladstone-Freestroke Technique", and also demonstrated masterfully by John Riley in this youtube video:

2) "Push-Pull/Throw-Catch" motion. I've seen this technique referred to by several different names, but it's all the same idea. I use this technique all the time when I play: I use it to execute double strokes, and also when playing the jazz ride cymbal pattern. Once it becomes subconscious and part of your muscle memory, this technique, for me at least, tends to just happen naturally when playing. I start very slow, and speed up through a few subdivisions. I also practice this motion with my hands unison, and separately. As you can see in the video, I can eke out 32nd notes (with the metronome at quarter=60) with my right hand, but not really with my left.
3) Fingers technique. This is really the only time I turn my hands fully into French grip when playing on the snare; I find that this positioning of the hand/wrist makes it easier to manipulate the fingers. I play 16th note triplets with my hands unison, and then I split it up into 32nd note triplets. I go back to the unison 16th note triplets so that I can switch which hand I lead the 32nd note triplets with.
4) Freaking out. After going through my routine, I like to just play for a minute or two, without thinking too much. I try to just let my hands "go", hopefully putting some of the previous techniques into spontaneous use. Important: Shake out your hands before the "spaz" portion of practice. Here's a video of me demonstrating all the elements of this pad warm-up. This is very condensed, when I do this in practice I usually take about 30 minutes-I typically watch something online as I do it to entertain myself.

In addition to this routine, there are two other things I periodically will add to my hand/pad practice. First, I like to occasionally read through something from the classic snare drum book, "Modern Rudimental Swing Solos" by Charley Wilcoxon. Many great jazz drummers have practiced material from this book, and it's full of hip rudimental stuff that can be adapted to the drum set. During my ten days in California, I worked on a solo called "Swinging the 26". I'm not sure what the number "26" has to do with anything...perhaps the Rhombicuboctahedron was Mr. Wilcoxon's favorite Archimedean solid. Perhaps he liked to run marathons. No one will ever know.  There are some interesting and fairly challenging phrases in this solo, and here is a video of me attempting it:

The other thing I occasionally add to my hand practice is a cool "Moeller" exercise that was shown to me by master drummer Steve Fidyk. This exercise uses page 5 of "Stick Control". It's a bit difficult to explain in writing, but I'll try to make it clear with this explanation, and a brief video. Each written sticking becomes 3 notes, so that a "R", as in "right hand", would become RRR, using a whipping "Moeller" motion. So, this:

Becomes this:

Now, you can go through all of page 5 of Stick Control this way, using a whipping Moeller motion, and you can try different accent placements, for each different partial of the triplet (first, middle, or last). To make the exercise a little more interesting, and challenging, you can "fill in the spaces" with your left hand, so that you get 16th note triplets. For this exercise, you'll want leave out the last 16th note triplet, so that this:

Becomes this:

However, when you have the same hand in a row, as in double strokes, you do not omit that last 16th note triplet, creating a continuous flow of 16th note triplets. Here's what double strokes (line 3, on page 5 of Stick Control) would look like, interpreted this way.

Like with the simpler version, you can practice this with the Moeller accent placed on the first, middle, or last triplet partial. It sounds complicated, but when once you try it, this exercise starts to make intuitive sense pretty quickly. The most important thing to remember when trying this exercise, is that you are executing the whipping Moeller motion correctly, as opposed to simply playing it as fast as possible. Hopefully this video will help to make sense of the exercise as well.

So, that's it. Stay tuned for my next post! Hint: it's me replacing my roof.