Page 17 - 2017-BMR-September

Mind the Ornaments: Setting Your Students Up for Audition Success with Flams, Ruffs and Rolls

Experiment with different subdivisions to help your students the tree itself being the primary note that the grace
to find the base rhythm (or check pattern) that will help them notes lead to. This imagery may help your students
to sound the best. This may yield different results for different to understand that first and foremost, the primary
players. You can help your students to strive for a continuous note needs to be played with great sound quality
vibration of the batter head, the resonant head, and the snare and solid timing.
units by making sure that your school’s equipment is well-tuned When teaching students to play concert style
and maintained. flams, point out that they may have to play a more
open style of flam than they are used to playing in
Flams and Ruffs: “Adding ornaments to the tree” marching band. Keep the flam as open as possible
I was recently discussing concert snare drum ornamentation without letting it sound like two separate notes.
with Jeremy Branson, who is the associate principal percussionist Imagine a flam as merely a “thicker” sounding
in the Pittsburgh Symphony. He tells his students that grace stroke. A common problem that young players may
notes in flams or ruffs are like the ornaments on a Christmas tree, have with their flams is that they lift their grace note
simply decorating and adding to the overall big picture, with
up from the resting position before they let it fall.
This will often create a flam that is far too open.
Another challenging issue is when students “force”
the primary note down towards the drum, rather
than letting the stick fall naturally. This may create a
flam that “pops,” with the grace note striking at the
same time as the primary note.
The following exercise is useful when refining
flam technique (see Fig. 5):

FIGURE 5:

The player should start with the grace note low
to the drum (about 1 cm off the head) and the
primary note at a higher height (around 9 inches).
The player then should drop straight down from the
resting position with the grace note hand and play
4 taps (being sure not to lift the stick up before it
drops down to strike). To create the flam, the player
merely lets the primary stroke fall towards the
drum at precisely the same moment that the grace
note begins to fall. The flam is simply created by
the disparity of distance between the drum and the
right and left hand respectively.

Bandmasters Review • September 2017 15 Texas Bandmasters Association