Omni-Exercise: How I Teach 16th-Note Timing
16th-note timing is an exercise that had come up multiple times in my performance career. I usually blew it off as something I could easily do and sadly never though too much of it. As a teacher, this exercise has turned into a bedrock of my marching teaching., You can teach almost every single basic marching percussion skill using just this exercise by following the process outlined below. Much of the initial steps of this process are thanks to Aaron Farris.
The exercise itself and accompanying practice tracks can be viewed here. The check pattern, called variation 0 is written fully at the top. To play the other versions, replace each 16th note rhythm (in the brackets) with a single variation listed below, #1-14. Most students understand the exercise after playing one of the variations. Much can be learned by just performing the exercise, but specific rules transform the exercise to encompass a variety of other skill sets. Those rules are:
1. Always mark time
2. Play at 3 inches
3. Play with as much velocity as possible
4. Play with as loose a grip as possible
5. Know how to count the rhythm before playing
A detailed explanation of these rules and their pedagogy is below, followed by the teaching process. Adherence to all rules creates success by forcing the right things to happen and not allowing students to guess. Picking and choosing rules will lead to pedagogical gaps in the exercise. Allow students to make mistakes, big mistakes, and then help the students learn from them. These rules establish a process and will not be mastered in one day.
1. Always Mark Time
This is a timing exercise and solid foot timing is the foundation of all marching percussion. By going very slow, this exercise helps younger students perform more complex rhythms with their feet. Time begins at the metronome, is transferred to the feet, and then to the hands in that order. As such, when a student is struggling to put their hands and feet together, start with the feet. I tell them to stop playing until the feet are fixed and jump back on when they are comfortable. This can be a struggle, but it is one worth fighting and may require further break down of the exercise. Progress will likely start slowly and pick up as students perform more patterns. Like I’ll talk about with playing, I encourage “high velocity” marking time, especially at slow tempos. Use a slight stomp instead of softly placing the foot on the ground. fellow snare-tech Corey Smith used to say, “you have to play the big drum first,” referring to the earth, the ground.
2. Play at 3 Inches
Translation: play very low, piano or softer. In most set positions, this means the stick will be parallel to the playing surface. I feel like students spend too much time working on technique at loud volumes and forgo the fact that most marching music consists of taps. While playing loud usually incorporates some sort of forearm support to the wrist motion, soft playing uses only the wrist (contrasting to my concert playing where I use more arm in very soft playing). Additionally, this form of practice also leads to a gap in listening, leading students to focus their listening on the accents more than the connecting taps. Playing taps together will create clean accents, not vice versa. Students need to spend as much time, if not more, developing a fundamental soft technique and sound. As a bonus, playing lower better helps students coordinate their hands to their feet compared to higher playing.
3. Play with as much velocity as possible
When I tell student to play with more velocity, it is often confused for faster rhythm. Velocity, in this sense, means the speed it takes from the top of the stroke to reach the drum head. Think about bouncing a basketball. If you just drop it, it won’t rebound back to your hand. Placing just the slightest amount of force (or velocity) on the ball returns it easily to your hand, Then, you just worry about throwing the ball down again without lifting it off the ground. Drumming is the same way. Put in too little velocity, the stick doesn’t rebound. Put in a little bit, the stick rebounds back to the proper height.
To get the best sound, projection, and control of the stick, it takes even more velocity. With higher velocity, air is better able to travel from the top head of a drum to the bottom head, producing a better snare response for the snareline and crisper articulation on all the drums. Higher velocity also produces a higher pitch. Going back to the basketball, compare the sound of a dribble vs. slamming it into the ground.
The most important pedagogical quality of playing with high velocity is taking away the ability to guess. Guessing is the worst approach to musical education. If you guess wrong, you don’t know what to fix. If you guess right, congrats, you have no idea what you did. There is no winning when you guess. High velocity playing requires energy and students must choose to produce that energy at the proper time. As such, student who play with high velocity have to deliberately choose when to play the stroke. This allows teachers to identify timing errors and inconsistencies. If the stoke isn’t fast enough, the correction is to play with higher velocity before talking about rhythm. Set the approach first, then clean the product.
The inability to guess is also why students should be encouraged to make mistakes. BIG mistakes…and often. When mistakes are normalized, students are empowered to try harder, knowing that failure is not polarizing, but instead a learning opportunity.
As a note, If played properly, students will notice that the stick bounces back to the top of the stroke quickly and before they need to throw the stick down again. For the sake of this exercise, hold the stick at the top of the stroke until it needs to be thrown down again. This contrasts with the desire to have a constant motion to the stick, which, while feeling great and appropriate at times, is often the exception rather than the rule…outside of purposefully floating the stick.
4. Play with as loose a grip as possible
The more soft the hands, the better the sound. Take a fresh pair of sticks, squeeze the grip, and click them together. It produces a dead sound. Now repeat with a loose grip the sticks sing in a semi-resonant pitch. This stick-sound translates to the drum when playing. The looser the grip, the more open and warm the sound. To help with this, I like to think of the stick as a raw egg; Squeeze too much and the egg cracks, but hold on too little and the egg falls out. A happy medium creates a soft grip equally around the stick while allowing it to resonate (always lean towards softer hands).
When playing with high velocity, the increased energy leads to tighter grip. Encourage students to have high energy wrist turns without transferring the energy to the fingers. Muscle isolation exercises can help. Like velocity, developing a loose grip is easier to teach at soft dynamics and then transferred to loud dynamics rather than vice versa.
Using the first three rules together, I find it easier to train younger students to have the same approach. Playing lower, looser, and with high velocity limits reduces possible variations.
5. Know how to count the rhythms before playing.
I use this exercise to not only teach timing, but promote reading skills. As each new variation is introduced, we look at the rhythm on the page. We talk about how to count it (I use 1 e & a) and then I often talk about how it looks: how 8th notes look like they take more space and 16th notes are closer together, etc. We then count as a group. I find this process builds more confidence in students who may be seeing some of these rhythms for the first time. It helps them understand the rhythms before playing it instead of guess and just playing what they hear with the group. I want to present visual, audio, and hands-on learning experiences. This extra time makes the students better at reading music, which makes them better musicians, and saves me time.
Using the Exercise
When I start teaching this exercise, I start only with the first rule on variation 0. Once students understand that, I add rules one at a time, with a rep in between, until the whole process is understood, within about 10 minutes.
This exercise is about quality, not quantity. Doing many reps of a single variation will be more helpful than one rep of each variation. As such, you will probably not get through every variation in the first rehearsal (or maybe even the second). Instead, you should plan to repeat the exercise in multiple, consecutive rehearsals. I find this to be most helpful at the beginning of the season. I usually plan at least a half-hour or more each rehearsal post auditions through band camp. Following the rules listed above, I strive for complete perfection of each rhythm and base my comments on experience levels. For upper classmen, I’m often listening to the tiniest detail about their timing and technique. For struggling freshmen, I might just be happy if they can play with velocity while mark time playing.
Since many students do not know how to play better than they currently do, I am always trying to give them something to mentally focus on. If the student is bored, I’m not giving them enough to think or focus on. That said, the exercise can get monotonous over a period of time. I have a few different ways to give the exercise variety.
Using the built in drum-set beats on a DB-90 help students feel the downbeats differently and get rid of the stereotypical beeping sound. I’ll often let student choose the groove or pick a random number and see what happens. Feeling a rhythm is different between a rock beat or 3-2 clave. Similarly, if you know of a song with a consistent tempo, you can play with different rock and pop charts!
I also mix things up by changing the instrumentation: solo players, specific sections, etc. I’ll alternate between group-playing and playing solos down the line. This puts more pressure on students and allows them to track their own progress. Mistakes are acceptable and encouraged. Find fun ways to group individuals or sections together: specific grade levels, or those whose favorite color is blue, birthday in the second half of the year, etc. Being creative and silly increases student enjoyment and morale. I might also choose sections to play different variations simultaneously. Each variation consists of 16th-note based rhythms, so all variations work together. You can have everyone play all 14 variations simultaneously, or “accidentally” have your bass line play lasers and they won’t be listening to each other to know when to play.
One final layer I add to the mix when we are pretty comfortable with all the variations is listening levels. In the beginning of the process, I tell students to only focus on themselves at all times, contrasting to a normal listening situation. I make small individual tweak to each player to get them to have similar approaches. We’ll then start to open our ears to the rest of the ensemble. We’ll play a couple reps in a row where your job is to focus only on your playing. The next few reps we’ll open up to listening to your sub-sections (snare, marimba, etc.), followed by full sections (battery, front ensemble) and then the entire percussion section. It is interesting to see student’s ears open up and start to hear mistakes from across the room or suddenly be aware of how their sound fits in with other around them. We can get to this point much faster through this exercise than we can with any show segment, and by the time we are at the point in the show, the students have already experienced high levels of listening through this exercise.
Game Idea: Drum of Doom
Something I came up with out of the blue during band camp, and a student favorite, is the “Drum of Doom” game. I took small slips of paper and write 0-14 on them to go with each pattern and put them inside a one-headed concert tom (slightly sacrilegious…). I would then have the student pull out a slip and the whole group would play whatever number variation they pulled out. I also added some “Whammies”, such as playing solo, only the basses, or run a lap, etc. Get creative! This created suspense and excitement while still focusing on the skill sets of the exercise. It was a great way to turn this exerciseinto a treat every now and then.
If this exercise has benefitted you and your program, or you have other ideas to make it better and exciting, feel free to reach out. I would love to talk about it!
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