While musicians who play a melodic instrument are used to reading music with ties, I’ve found that many drummers have difficulty when a drum arrangement is full of tied notes. No doubt one of the reasons has to do with the lack of practice reading material with tied notes in drum books.The rhythm in the following etude is simple, but it’s replete with ties. Reading it perfectly at sight may prove challenging even for drummers experienced in reading charts. I suggest that initially you concentrate on the snare part and don’t worry about playing it together with the bass part. After you feel comfortable playing the snare part try to include the bass, which coincides mostly with the accents in the snare part. I’ve purposely omitted any dynamic marks in order for you to concentrate on playing the music correctly without having to consider anything else. Once you become used to playing the entire piece correctly add your own dynamics, and try to develop the etude to a medium tempo with a jazz feel.
On a jazz or rock chart you would often see the ties from a note onto a cymbal because the ringing of the cymbal extends the sound, but the following only indicates ties from a drum to another drum. Usually the arranger might indicate the tied snare notes with a roll, which would make the reading trickier than it is so I decided to omit the rolls. The object is just to get the reader used to reading and counting notes with ties. Besides, the drum is usually reinforcing the sound of the brass, and when the brass plays it causes the snare to keep vibrating to a degree, which extends the sound naturally..
