Five studies for snare drum – Michel Pascal

Description

Five studies for snare drum – Michel Pascal

Five snare drum studies with electronic sounds

Audio tracks free to download with coupon code printed on the sheet music: DOWLMOAD

Five short studies for snare drum, in virtual duet with fixed sounds, all from the same instrument.

Without being exhaustive, these studies propose to the young musician a consequent range of techniques with the sticks and the fingers: position of the impacts, flams, rim-shots, mills, pardiddle, various rolls, rhythmic installation, accelerando and descelerendo..

In the first, the student will try to bring to life the tempo constructed by the fixed sounds that exploit various resonances of the drum itself, by moving over them like a sound magnifying glass.

The second one is dedicated to finger strikes. It plays with the space between the temporal grain created by a fast pulse, and numerous grains of sound, shuffled to the point of randomness, as if by a digital game inside the head of the drum.

The third, is technically very easy for the drumstick, but requires a feeling, a particular musical attention in order to integrate as musically as possible with the tone of the fixed sounds. Tempo is fluctuating: from the bouncing of drumsticks at a physically impossible speed to stretching the resonances of the head’s timbre like flat areas of color out of time.

In the fourth, devoted to double stroke and flams, the fixed sounds set a strict tempo against which the impacts must sometimes anticipate, sometimes delay the main beats. The electronics demultiply the sound of the drum, in packets, creating aggregates much like a small ensemble might do. The hemiola is a rhythmic figure in which binary and ternary divisions interpenetrate.

The fifth etude, probably the most difficult, plays on a fast tempo, various permutations of impact accents in both hands, which create varied rhythmic figures.