I’ve been teaching quite a few younger students lately. Anyone with experience teaching younger drum students has run into the problem of mashing the sticks into the pad or drum. It’s a natural problem for young students; it’s natural for someone to pick up drum sticks for the first time and then bang and mash the sticks into the surface because, for all they know, drumming is just about hitting stuff.

Even older, more experienced drummers also suffer from this problem, mostly drum set players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a drum set player “deadstick” his or her stick against the snare while playing backbeats. I’m not sure why. Is it because they’re trying to hit really hard? Is it plain lack of stick control? Or perhaps they just never learned and don’t really care all that much about how physically detrimental deadsticking is (can’t they feel the shock being absorbed by their hands and arms?) and how bad it sounds.

Of course, with technology, you can get a good sound out of bad playing, but that’s another post.

One method I use to solve the problem of mashing the sticks into the head is to use a basketball analogy. When a person dribbles a basketball, he or she pushes the ball towards the ground with a downward gesture of the hand. As the ball leaves the hand and hits the ground, it comes back up and meets the hand again. The hand allows the ball to bounce to a certain height before repeating the dribbling process.

No one ever dribbled a basketball successfully by mashing the ball into the ground, right?

It’s the same with a drumstick. As the stick hits the head, the stick will want to bounce back up. Keeping the basketball analogy in mind, I encourage my mashing students to get the stick off of the head right after impact. And it works.

The only problem with this method is that, in marching percussion, we freeze sticks in playing position. For my lines, this means that the bead rests one inch above the surface. This height will differ depending on the instructor. I, personally, also teach the concept of playing position to my drum set students because it promotes downstroke-oriented playing, it’s comfortable, and it readies them for marching percussion should they choose to go that path.

So, when students attempt to follow the basketball analogy, they often pull their sticks up higher than playing position. This is fine for playing consecutive notes like a string of 8th notes on a single hand or hand-to-hand 16th notes where the hands play continuously, but not for releases or tap-to-accent patterns where stopping the stick in playing position is the desired result.

Despite this problem, I consider this to be an acceptable way to begin teaching mashing students how not to mash. Once the student gets rid of the habit of mashing their sticks into the head, I can then concentrate on getting them to freeze their sticks in playing position. The more important thing with mashing students is to achieve a single sound from their attacks instead of the buzz that results from mashing.

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Has it really been that long since I posted last? Shame.