Adding on to my previous blog post about how to hold sticks/play the drums, today I will be talking about bass drums and cymbals. These are the less intricate pieces of a drumline but they are equally as important! The bass drums are the heartbeat of the drumline/band and the cymbals help keep the tempo.Now lets take a closer look at each one individually:)

Bass Drums:

Bass drums are extremely simple and extremely fun to play. I played bass 3 my junior year of high school and had an amazing time! There are multiple bass drums varying in size on a drumline. Typically schools have 4-5. Bass 1 is the smallest drum and is the highest pitched and bass 5 is one of the heavier ones with a lower pitch. Bass 5 looks massive but some colleges march 7-8 so at least they aren’t that big! To play the bass drum, you hold your mallets the same way you’d hold matched grip for the snare or tenor. The only difference is your hands are turned because you’re playing upright instead of out in front of you. When playing, you use a combination of your wrists and fingers to keep control of the mallets. Your wrist will be doing the same motion it would be if you were turning a doorknob. When playing, you don’t want to hit all over the drum or flail your arms around. The mallet should always hit the center of the drum head and you shouldn’t use your arms.Just like I said in my last post, make sure you stay relaxed! No matter what you’re playing, someone should be able to take the mallets right out of your hands. If you would like any extra information about how to hold the mallets, here’s a video that explains it really well 🙂 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yfotDvRY7E0

Cymbals:

There isn’t a whole lot to playing cymbals but obviously there are things you shouldn’t do. People often laugh at the cymbals player but they’re actually quite heavy. You need strength to be able to hold them for so long and to play them correctly. When you stand, make sure your weight is evenly distributed between your feet and that you aren’t slouching. To hold the cymbals, you do NOT put your hands through the straps. That will affect the sound. Hold the strap out and grab it about one inch from the dome with your thumb and pointer finger. To play them, there is a basic stroke. Start off with both cymbals up in playing position. The cymbal in your left hand stays put while the right hand does all the work. The right hand goes down and circles back up to hit the left and ultimately end up back in playing position. If you need any help, I’ll link a great website below 🙂 They explain everything really clearly and have a great video attached. http://freepercussionlessons.com/how-to-play-the-cymbals-the-basics/

Thank you guys for coming back! I hope you all enjoyed this post 🙂 Next time I’ll go over how to read cadences and review some of my favorites!

A drumline is exactly what the name suggests, a line of people playing the different types of marching drums. The drums are snares, tenors/quads, basses, and cymbals. While they all come together to perform, each drum is very different from each other. They are all played differently and need different sticks/mallets. For today’s post we’ll take a closer look at the snare drum and the tenors. These are the two trickier drums to play and typically need the most focus and practice. Once you get the basics down, you can start playing around and having more fun with it!

Snare Drums:

There are two ways to hold your sticks to play the snare correctly: match grip and traditional. In the picture above, they are using  the traditional way. The stick in your right hand is held between your thumb and pointer finger and leaves about two inches of the stick in the back. The stick in your left hand is a bit trickier. Hold your left hand out, palm up, and set the stick in the space between your thumb and pointer finger. The rest of it should sit on the cuticle of your ring finger. Your thumb should touch the first knuckle on your pointer finger and your middle finger should sit on top of the stick. To play your right hand, you use a combination of your fingers and wrist to control the stick; with the left do a turning motion similar to turning a door knob. Congratulations! You just played traditional! If you play correctly, you can put a quarter in your left hand while playing and it won’t fall out. If you wish to play match grip, do the same steps with your left hand that you did with the right. If you do them correctly they will look like this:

Traditional:                                                        Match:

Tenors/Quads: 

You may hear these drums go by multiple names depending on who is speaking. Many people call them tenors and many call them quads due to the four drums. Sometimes they’ll have an extra drum called the shot drum and are referred to as quints, meaning 5. Today I’ll just refer to them as tenors. Tenors are a bit trickier to play because of the arm movements to play each drum, but they really aren’t that bad. Tenors need different sticks than snares, which I’ll dive more into in a later post, but are played the same snares with match grip. Again, to do this you set the stick between your thumb and pointer finger with about two inches sticking out the back. You use your middle, ring, and baby finger along with your wrist to control the stick when you play. You do this for both hands and move your arms in a sweeping motion to move from drum to drum. Keep your stick heights low and start slower and you can build yourself up to an amazing tenor player 🙂

A common problem with playing snare and tenors is tensing up. When you play, you want to stay relaxed, even during fast tricky rhythms. No matter what you’re playing, someone should be able to easily pull the stick right out of your hand.

I hope you all have fun practicing your sick snare and tenor skills 🙂 I’ll make a post about bass drums and cymbals soon and then you can all start a sweet little drumline!