The distance between you and a professional drummer is a snare drum

Snare drum technique is a core foundational skill for all percussion instruments, and every drummer understands its importance.

The Development of the Snare Drum

The snare drum was first used by Swiss infantry regiments in 14th-century Switzerland for military and wartime purposes. Later, it spread throughout Europe. Before the advent of radio and electronic communication, armies often used snare drums to convey orders to soldiers. For example, in the United States, the military used different snare drum beats to command soldiers during waking, meals, and training.

Characteristics of the Snare Drum

The snare drum is characterized by its penetrating sound and wide dynamic range. Like a guitar, the player can alter its tone at will through internal and external factors, resulting in a rich and expressive range. However, if the player fails to control the sound properly, the snare drum can become a major nuisance, both to the player and to others.

Because the snare drum's sound is the most recognizable in a drum set, professional drummers frequently use different snare drums to vary the overall sound, allowing other, less obvious tones in the set to blend into the music. When performing, drummers often bring their own snare drums to play alongside the venue's shared drum set. This further demonstrates the crucial role the snare drum plays in music, its ability to create highly personalized and artistic sounds, and its crucial importance to the instrument.

The Snare Drum's Place in Percussion

The snare drum can be said to be the "ancestor" of modern percussion. Therefore, playing the snare drum is the most fundamental and universal of all percussion instruments: mastering the snare drum skillfully also means mastering the core techniques for playing the snare drum in military bands and orchestras, as well as drum sets, tambourines, and even instruments like timpani and marimbas.

However, the snare drum is also the most challenging instrument to master, so it's often learned as the initial percussion instrument. Many teaching methods suggest, "First learn the snare drum for a year, then move on to the drum set."

You should know that the drum set is a complex rhythmic instrument, requiring coordinated playing with all four limbs. The snare drum requires only two hands and plays a single rhythm. Without mastering both hands, how can you achieve coordinated playing with all four limbs? This is one of the fundamental reasons many drummers say they can't find a sense of rhythm.

How to Practice the Snare Drum

The snare drum's playing skill reflects a drummer's ability. It's not only an expressive solo instrument but also an essential component of music, expressing many flavorful elements through the snare drum. Snare drum technique varies depending on the type of music a drummer plays. Some techniques can be applied across the board, but all snare drumming skills are based on fundamental skills.

Drumming is a sport. Anything related to sport requires technique—that is, the correct trajectory or posture. Special snare drum practice is designed to help us understand how we move and strike the drum. Our playing consists of single strokes, so single strokes are the foundation of our percussion learning. In this tutorial, we begin by learning and practicing single strokes.

After learning how to move and how to hit, many people think that this is all. In fact, it is not, because in addition to hitting, we also have to learn how to control our hitting and how to get the desired pleasant tone by controlling our hitting. Drummers who only know how to hit but don’t know how to control will play a relatively simple instrument and will not be able to express the emotions of the music well. This involves fixed-point hitting. Fixed-point is the best control training, and the best way to fix a point is to learn to hit on the snare drum. The simplest example: every drummer will perform daily fixed-point hitting exercises on the dumb drum. The dumb drum corresponds to the snare drum. If you want to improve the speed and skills of your drumming hands, you have to start learning the playing techniques of the snare drum.