Hello, I’m Wes Crawford. We’re now going to talk about some exercises that will get you going on your coordination and your evenness of stroke, your proper strokes on the snare drum. All these were transferred to the drum set eventually. So don’t loose patience even though we’re saying how to learn the drum set and we’re just starting on one drum. Do keep your patience with this. The one who has the most patience in drumming really comes out ahead.
First, we’re going to talk about—now that we know how to hold the sticks and stroke and hit the drum, we’re going to start playing a game. It’s the 10-to-one-to-10 game. And the whole purpose of this is not to see if you can count to 10 frontwards and backwards obviously, but to see if you can think of one more simple task and still continue to stroke properly, to hold the sticks properly with your fulcrum intact and to stroke straight up and down with your wrist. We’re hitting in the center of the drum now and try to make both tips of the stick strike in a small circle in the center of the drum, so you can get the most similar sound between them.
Okay, play the 10-to-one-to-10 game. You’ll hit 10 times with the right hand immediately followed by 10 with the left, then nine with the right, then nine with the left, eight with the right, eight with the left, all the way down to one and then immediately from one go back up to two with each hand, three with each hand, four with each hand, all the way back up to 10. So you see, you have to do just a little bit of thinking and that’s great because then you really know if you’re stroking your hand positions or in your muscle memory and that they’re feeling very normal for you to do. So that’s really what you want to focus on with your hand positions and your stroke as you do this counting game.
I’m going to demonstrate this but rather than start at 10 I’m going to start at five and I’m going to go to five-to-one-to-five. Now, count out loud as I do this. You might not hear every word
[Demonstration]
And as you noticed I played it evenly. You probably want to do it slower than that. I was just doing a little faster so we could get through it and so you could understand it. After you’re comfortable with that exercise, go to the exercise that every drummer on any kind of drum around the world practices, the single stroke roll.
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