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Below is a post I shared in my Learning Percussion newsletter. If you're interested in more than nerdy percussion tech-talk, I hope you take a look.​

It’s been a remarkable semester here at ASU and with my little studio of curious learners across the country. I’m excited to reflect on those experiences in the coming weeks.

But first, the NanoSIMS.

I recently visited Arizona State University’s Nano­scale Sec­ond­ary Ion Mass Spec­tro­meter (NanoSIMS), a large, incredibly complex, device that shoots ions at tiny things in order to determine their elemental elemental composition at an incredible resolution (e.g., inside of a bacteria or even a virus…).

The NanoSIMS shoots cesium (positively charged) or oxygen (negatively charged) ions at a small sample. The ions formed by the impact of the ion beam against the sample enter a mass spectrometer and are separated according to mass using a giant magnet. According to the Max Planck Institute (which also has one) “we can dif­fer­en­ti­ate the 32 iso­tope of sul­phur (32S) from the 16O2 mo­lecule, al­though both have mass 32.” Essentially, it can determine the composition of a microbe with incredible precision with more precision than a French chef can determine the ingredients of a sauce.

Scientists can use this machine to study the natural composition of nano-sized particles or they can juice the system by adding isotopes at abundances you would never find in nature. For the former, they could learn if tiny particles from outer reaches of our solar system or beyond contain water and might be habitable by life. For the latter, they could feed a bacteria sugars made with the rare isotope of carbon (13C). If the microbe eats those sugars, it will become made of the 13C carbon. If they look at how much 13C appears in cells over time, they can also get growth rates which can be really helpful for cells that grow too slow to detect it in normal laboratory growth experiments. It can study cell metabolism to determine what microbes ate. It can also analyze trace elements in stones (extra terrestrial meteorites) to learn about the environmental processes that created them.

It’s also expensive, delicate, French-made, and prone to malfunction: kind of like an oboe.

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It’s clear that the most effective musical learning techniques separate the development of instrumental facility (”technique”) from the learning of repertoire. But what techniques should one learn? The most efficient answer would be to address the percussive techniques most often found in one’s repertoire. A musician interested in separating technical development from musical growth and interested in practicing as efficiently as possible would need to know the techniques most often found in one’s repertoire. In fact, it would be doubly efficient to study the most asked for techniques in general. Why buy 1000 socket wrenches when you might only need two?

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I have called this a “most-wanted list” of techniques, and encourage my students to find techniques in their repertoire and create musically interesting exercises out of those techniques.

So, if I aimed the NanoSIMS’ cesium ions at the snare drum repertoire I expect my students to know, what elements might I find? Here’s what I came up with

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(you can stop reading if you don’t want to get DEEP in the percussive weeds):

Version 1

My first snare drum taxonomy was inspired inspired by a technique packet of Christopher Lamb’s, the inomitable Principal Percussionist of the New York Philharmonic. Lamb’s survey takes us through a comprehensive practice routine. He suggests exercises from a variety of seminal American and French texts, and indicates the purpose of each exercise. It’s fantastic.

My needs are different. I wanted mine to expose my students to more seminal texts in our pedagogical literature, but to shift the focus towards skills required in chamber music and away from symphonic repertoire (soft playing, extreme timbral flexibility, a general lightness and melodicism). I wanted the ability to have many exercises which articulated in different manners ways of developing similar technical and musical skills. I wanted to be able to find a technical study that was close to a piece of repertoire, but not exactly it. I wanted to be able try an example with a student, and easily find a parallel exercise if the original didn’t resonate. I wanted to emphasize creativity!

I wanted to take a variety of lenses to what I consider to be the principal difficulty in playing percussion: creating musical character and inflection on an attack dominated instrument. And, I wanted it to be more accessible than dragging 20 books around.

In essence, I wanted a taxonomy—a method of identifying species and categories of exercises based on shared characteristics—and not a practice routine. Ideally, this text would allow an astute percussionist to observe difficulties in repertoire and easily juxtapose species of similar exercises to buttress their learning.

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But, you might ask: isn’t there already such a chart? The Percussive Arts Society 50 Rudiments While the list of rudiments is a fine place to start, it doesn’t cover the techniques I was using most often. And I wanted my work to focus on even smaller elements than rudiments.

Lamb's chapters correspond to techniques. I took these headings (genera) and reclassified them as types of motions. I broadened the scope of included species of exercises, drew upon more sources, and retooled the organization to be a little more weaponized, with the goal of addressing what I see as some of the most impactful developments to make to our percussion playing. Each chapter includes the same types of exercises from a number of different authors. Et voilà!

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I. Mind, Torso, Shoulder, Arm, Wrist, Finger et. al.

Harnessing natural rebound by cooperating with a drumhead or playing surface. Our fingers, wrists, and arms can each independently strike percussion instruments. How does it sound when each group works alone, or when they work together?

II. Rebounds, Forwards and Backwards (Groups of Two)

To me, rebounds occur two ways. In the wild, their performance emphasizes the natural tendency of the 2nd stroke in a pair to be less strong. The hands are relaxed but the rhythm and dynamic of the two notes are uneven. The second, “domesticated,” format artificially enhances the 2nd stroke of a double to generate evenness in volume and rhythm when necessary. By balancing exertion against the drumhead’s powerful natural rebound, percussionists can harness their relaxation and play with directed laziness.

III. Rolls of all Shapes and Sizes (Three or More)

Sustained sound. Building on the symbiosis between our hands and the natural rebound of the drum, we search for a roll with the same sound color and malleability as our normal strokes, without substantial pressure into the head. Single, double, triple, and multiple bounce strokes are juxtaposed and density of roll varies independently of dynamic.

IV. Agréments, Accoutrements

The bountiful grace notes we use on the snare drum remind me of Baroque keyboard or string playing. Here, we develop rhythmic and dynamic control of grace notes through relaxation and constant motion.

V. Beginning to Begin: Etudes, Exercises Recapitulatifs and Almost Repertoire

Playing with inflection and character: short etudes. Suave, timbrally diverse playing is essential.

How I use it

• Isolate challenging passages in the music I’m learning.
• Isolate which category of technique might be most responsible for the difficulty in the passage
• Pick an exercise from the category that is most similar to the repertoire at hand.
• Go. To. Town!

V.2: Grace Notes

One cannot simply make something then expect it to work forever. And my little packet was no exception. Time to employ some design thinking!

The problem: I was finding that when I worked on the grace note chapter, I was leaving the grace note chapter to work on rebounds or inverted rebounds instead. The grace notes were not really a special category of technique: they were single strokes or rebounds, or inverted rebounds or multiple bounces. In fact, sectioning them off into their own category violated my dictum above: “what something looks like in notation might not indicate the physical movements needed to produce it”

​Here’s an example of the equivalence between grace notes and notes.

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So, I refocused the cesium ions and, recalibrated towards physical movement, took them out, and replaced them with this:

1. Mind, Torso, Shoulder, Arm, Wrist, Finger, et. al.
2. Grouping Notes: Rebounds, Forwards and Backwards
3. Inverted Doubles
4. Bounces
5. ALMOST Repertoire

You can read more here:

Next time…

A love letter of learning to Gardeners’ World​

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