Articulation With Brushes (Using Stick Control)

Ah yes! Just what the drumming community needed- another way to use stick control! This classic drum book by G.L. Stone is one of those books that seems to hold something new every time you need it. It's like the room of requirement from Harry Potter...whatever you need is what you get, every time you open it! Today the topic is articulation. While many wind players and pianists have mastered articulation, drummers just don't think about it, and that's really a shame since brushes offer us percussionists a chance to think about note duration. The example used is example 45 from page 6 of Stick Control.

While there's certainly more than two articulations, in this exercise we'll be dealing with tenuto and staccto. For our purposes tenuto will be each note blending into each other (I suppose we could really call this legato but it made more sense to me to notate it as tenuto) and staccato notes will be separated. I also use a faster brush stroke for the staccato note, something Charlie Persip calls a "zit". Notice that each articulation study is organized by the number of staccato notes in the exercise, and then goes through each permutation available for that number of staccato notes.