Accent Tap Warm Up
We continue our warm up with an accent tap exercise.
Accent tap is a great way to work on your staccato stroke. Unlike the legato approach to eights, we need to control the stick’s rebound after the 9′ accents so we can play solid 3″ taps.
Two things to keep in mind:
- Don’t overplay the accents. This makes it super difficult to control any taps that come after
- Make sure your taps are beefy! No weak taps allowed in these parts.
Grab the sheet music here.
Establish Those Taps
We start off by establishing our right hand 3″ taps before playing our first 9″ accents on counts 2 and 4.
We then spice it up by playing accents on the + of 1 and downbeats of counts 3 and 4.
Now, repeat that pattern with your left hand.
I Need More Accents
When we get back to the right hand, we’ll play accents on count 2, + of 3, and then counts 1, 2, and 3 +.
Be careful with those two accents in a row. You don’t want to get too comfortable playing at 9″ because those taps are coming right back.
Play this off the left, and then repeat the whole exercise.
As always, make sure you stay relaxed. Tensing up won’t help you (ever), especially not in this exercise. Don’t hesitate to slow down the tempo if you are having trouble keeping up.
Other Accent Tap Videos and Lessons
Here are some other videos and lessons I made about accent tap. These add some movement around the drums for when you have things dialed in on one drum.
Basic Exercise Accent Tap is just that, a nice and easy accent tap warm up to get some movement going. This is from my INTRO TO TENOR DRUMMING course.
Feeling Cross is the accent tap exercise from my CROSSES master class and will incorporate, you guessed it, crosses!
As always, any feedback on how my lessons can be better is much appreciated.
Now, let’s get drumming!
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