Hi! I’m Wes Crawford and we’re going to learn a little bit more about how to play the drum set this time for beginner to intermediate level. Today, we’re going to begin by talking about some other kinds of sounds we can get out of the Snare Drum.
There are three other basic sounds I want to talk about today that you’ll use a lot in rock drumming. First two, when I speak about rock drumming, I’m really talking about all kinds of popular styles. You might call it rhythm and blues or funk, or hip-hop but a lot of it to us falls under the very general heading of rock.
First, let’s talk about the rim click. A lot of music where we’ll use a rim click sound. It’s a very resonant wood sound and the way we do this, we still hold it just like in match grip. It’ll get the strongest resonance if you turn the stick backwards and we’ll put our hand flat down. You have basically the back part of your hand or your wrist area is touching the drum and it never leaves the drum. We want to lay this part across the rim over here at about this position leaving about this much across. But you do need to experiment and find the sweet spot. There, that starts sounding nice, doesn’t it? When you do this stroke, leave the tip of the stick against the head as you lift it, so your back part of your hand wrist stays against the drum as does the tip of the stick. And then you come down across the rim consistently in the same place and you’ll get a consistent sound. Notice that my three fingers here are just loose. They’re not scrunched up like this. They’re just loosely laying on the drumhead when the stick is down. When it’s up, they rise too.
So practice this to get a good sound. All the beats you learn, you could use this sound as a substitute. So we’ll call this the rim click. There’s also a sound called the rim shot and in books, a lot of these terms are used a bit interchangeably but it makes the most sense to me to call this a rim click, and this a rim shot. And what I did to get this sound was I hit the rim and the snare drum at the same time. And this is used a lot in popular music, rock in other styles to get a real sharp sound. Particularly on beat two and four what we call the back beat in rock drumming.
The other type of sound you sometimes might want to get is sort of a special effect or maybe during a fill is a stick shot, where we actually put the tip of the stick down here in the middle and then hit at that stick with the other stick. So get used to using all of these different kinds of strokes and think about the sounds and how you might use them. It’s just three more sounds you can get out of your Snare Drum.
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