Marching Percussion Basics for Band Directors

welcome back to

percussion

class, today we are going to talk about

marching

percussion

in relation to the bad conductor's guide that I have posted on the board, let's talk about equipment, so with a

marching

snare of course you have the drum In itself, this is much deeper. than a concert air drum in regards to the shell, but the playing surface is actually the same diameter as a concert air drum, i.e. 14 inches. You also get all the accessories that come with it and the price certainly increases a bit. higher because of these things, but they are a necessity.

You will see that there is what is called a stadium grandstand here. This will work with all Yamaha hardware. It actually has a gas pressurized height adjustment system because these drums are pretty heavy and it helps hold it up, we have a stick bag, all the different stick manufacturers make different ones, but this is for a couple. You can also buy bags that hold two pairs and then you have the case. It is absolutely necessary to have a cover for these instruments and to protect them from the elements then you would take them off at performances but even when we were in the stands I had those covers on and the last thing here is the marching harness and you will see that there has been a whole many innovations over the years are completely height adjustable to any shape and size, you can make adjustments and there is foam here, they are about as comfortable as they can get at this point, you have to be careful not to lose the screws on these things and most of them are the same as the tension rods so you can use a drum wrench to make all the adjustments but just make sure that once things get loose they can be lost and a lot of these parts need to be Being replaced over time the traditional grip is very common in the marching drum world. your left hand is going to rotate and your right hand will be no different than your masked grip.

There are three points of contact with the traditional grip first you are going to grip the club with your thumb and index finger and then you will place your ring finger underneath in combination with your little finger. I call that the unit and the stick rests right on the cuticle, so that's where the flesh meets the finger, the nail. and then the third point of contact is your thumb and your index finger. They're going to create a T similar to how we played with the Stevens grip, so it's a combination of the pad of your thumb touching the first knuckle of your index finger, so we put all of them together.

Those together and this is our traditional grip setup on the drum line. It is very important that the height of the instrument is not different from what we learned in the first unit, so the playing surface should be a little below the belt line and you should make sure. it's consistent from when they're in the stands to when they're wearing them in harnesses, all of those things are adjustable on the harness, as I showed you before, every time we called on set, I asked to do the pinky check from the beginning, so you want to have Keep the drumsticks low enough so that when you take them out you don't change the distance between your hands and the drum.

The other thing is that when we take out the drumsticks, the right hand goes over the left hand and all you have to do is open that space between the thumb and the index finger, that top contact point and bring the stick over the top. and it is important that the thumb of your right hand remains right behind the sticks and that you still close the thumb and index finger over the sticks in the left hand so that there is no space there on the right, so that when everyone is paying attention look exactly the same, the drumstick will be exactly the same as the one we had in our box at the beginning of the year.

We take out the drumsticks in seven in particular. I was a fan of starring the metronome by giving them eight clicks so that once they hear the first click they know what to do. I always like my drum lines to keep time because it's a visual program. We will always be marching, so keeping our feet moving is very important. There are many different ways we mark time, but that's how it is. I would tell you that as soon as you hear the metronome, your feet are moving and your left foot is obviously going to move. being on one and three, that's something that we would practice quite a bit just moving our feet on the stick, so in addition to that, one last thing I want to add is that you would duck into five, six, seven, eight, so you're here. click-click click-click duh duh duh duh and then there's our attack, the points are super important and I want to take some time to explain why the metronome isn't going to work during the performance, so we need to rehearse. since we're going to act, you want the Center players to interpret the director's time, but everyone else listens through ducks, if that makes sense, so first we clear everything from side to side and we don't want everyone to interpret the time as individuals inside the line to the right, so the points, if we have, say, an isolated entrance at the back of the field, we want to make sure that they are together first instead of listening forward or everyone playing the drum major, so that's something that we practice even when we're just doing warm ups the drum heads are made of Kevlar so it's a very different type of sound and that's the same material that both bulletproof vests are made of and the reason The reason they use these materials is because you can get a much higher tone, they are durable and you can project a lot more with these drums, so go in and play it outside so it takes a little getting used to.

They used to be much more difficult, like playing on a table, and over time since then. In the early '90s when they were introduced, they tweaked it and made it a better streaming service, but you'll hear that it's almost like a shot. You know, they don't sound very good when played individually. meant to be played in groups or lines so quickly before moving on to the other instruments I wanted to talk about how you can build a warm up and I gave you a typical warm up package where everyone plays the same thing. there are no split parts or voices for the other instruments, most drum lines will start with a legato hitting exercise, hand eight is my favorite and is no different than what we are doing in our class, that's where the stick doesn't stop, it doesn't stop down, it doesn't stop up, so eight is usually the first thing everyone plays and then they shout various pitches and get everything going, so the listening exercise is as much as a physical warm-up exercise. and then from there I would get into multiple heights and before I got there I would have them play eighths at nine and then three and then nine and then three and that prepares dollars, which would be our next exercise where we have right there there is a box and then the next thing you'll have in your package is probably some kind of timing exercise and that's where we go with different natural combinations of hitting within a grid of sixteenth notes, so timing the sixteenth note with the one that's in the package We start with two beats of sixteenth notes of a kind of rebound hitting exercise.

A B is the quietest, then refers to the two different double hit patterns, so we have the first 1 1 e 2 and E and 4 in 1 e 2. and E and four one two and three four one two and three be a four and stop B starts with an eighth note 1 and 3 4 and 1 3 3 and the final stop and what I mean by a bounce hit we're not playing it like that, I mean, I'm certainly playing the right rhythm, but I'm playing staccato beats. I'm stopping the stick on the drum almost with a downward stroke, instead, on each of those 16th note rests, I'll just play, so I'll work on the bounce.

The slower stroke establishes a good quality rule just where both notes have integrity. Chicken roll works great. Here are the marching tenors, which are often called quads even today, although it can be said that there are more than five four drums. or five in this case, let's look at the configuration because it is very unique to this instrument. Drum one is here, here's drum: drum three on drum four and the reason they're set up that way is so all the weight isn't on one side. if we went low to high or high to low we would lean to one side, it would be very, very uncomfortable and then the next thing we have here are these two accent drums, here they are from left to right, low and high, it depends on the manufacturer . sometimes they are the same pitch or it is just a single accent drum in the middle, which is equally common to have a fifth.

This is a group of six tenors using sticks and combined grip. These have a nylon tip. You can also use puffy mallets and stuff like that, but I think drumsticks are the most common, they're a little bit shorter than your marching snare drumsticks, the stick extension is a little bit different because we can, depending on what drums you play in the attack, your hand. you'll move to a different spot, so on the seventh you always go out and play the drums, and then on the eighth beat you'd go to the next spot, so let's say you're playing a downbeat double stop on drums three and four on the downbeat . you have five six eight, so it's consistent every time you hit a club, the hitting points are very similar to when we play the quads, our elbows are a little more relaxed and I relate to playing a keyboard instrument where you have multiple surfaces . where you have to play, so it's taking this idea of ​​blended grip and a lot of drum lines play blended grip by taking that and making it more of this and sometimes your elbows will even touch your body if I'm playing on outside drums.

The beads are going to do what I call the windshield wiper because we want to play equidistant from the rim. They are going to change to the most popular things that sound in the marching quads. They are crosses. You can cross two reels. You can cross four reels. you can cross a drop if I'm crossing a drum my drumsticks cross right there on the sticks if it's two drums it's a little more on the hand if it's three drums it's even further up my arm it all depends on the size of the drum, the other thing is what I call sweeps and that's when, if we're working on a home base, it usually draws us in and usually on the first repetition of an exercise, the croisé is shown on drum two just to reduce the time and then we do vocals, that's what we call them when we move around the drums, so a typical vocal is a very easy thing to do.

These drums we are sweeping the drums. The other thing that young musicians do is move their hands accordingly. Here they do it. This kind of thing I just got over is bad technique on the instrument. You want to make sure your hands stay flat. A base drummer will have a mallet. You can see that it is made of the same material as the drumsticks, except we. it has a felt ball on the end, there is a conical shape and they are designed so that the thumb and index finger grip the stick on the thinnest part of that conical shape, you will see that there is none of the stick. coming out the back, so if you see that that means they're drowning out too much and not getting enough influence from the stick, the first thing you should do with your bass students is help them find the center of the head.

The center of the head will be their hitting point and once you get them to that position, have them memorize where their hand is on the rim in relation to where these tension rods are so they can discover that each time there is a big difference in the sound if I'm playing here versus right in the center and also get used to hearing that sound when your sticks are on the marching bass drum, your mallets will be perpendicular to the floor and make sure they're Both are the same, you don't need to hold on to the hoop or clicking on the hoop when you do it, you're just putting your hands on the hoop and they need to practice that movement and do it the same every time and you don't.

I don't want them to just move their wrists to do that, they move their elbow into position so that the mallet grip and hand position doesn't change as they do it, one of the most common problems I see with the bass drum grip. The hitchhiker's thumb is here, so instead of moving the elbow, they move the and then it becomes awkward to hold the foothold like you would with your normal matchstick grip box. Another common point is that the angle is too sharp in the way you get the sound. on a marching bass drum it's the rotation, so if you're at full volume you'll have your palms facing the ceiling and it's very similar to playing with a mallet marimba, but if you don't have the right angle here of your wrist, the last thing What I want to talk about is head angle, if you ever see a bassist looking forward he is doing something wrong and probably causing problems with front to back timing, his head should always be at a number one angle. 45 degrees.

They can see the rest of the drum line and they can see the drum major, so make sure your head is always at a 45 degree angle, so if I play eight, this is what it looks like one, two, three, four, five six seven.