Third-Stream Music Education

Cross Sticking on Snare Drum

November 27th, 2008

If music is a language, then every genre of music has its own vocabulary and syntax. Every musician who will become fluent in a genre must learn to incorporate all of the vocabulary and syntax of that genre. Your percussion students have as much sonic vocabulary to acquire as the rest of the band….and often more, since they must learn all of the same tonal theory as the winds but must also learn truckloads of percussion-specific techniques. One essential idiomatic percussion expression is the ‘cross stick’.

The cross stick goes by many names—none of which are self-explanatory—including ‘rim click’ and others. The cross stick is essential vocabulary for the percussionist, especially any percussionist who might ever play jazz, soft rock, R&B, Broadway musicals, or acoustic ‘coffee house’ gigs. It is not to be confused with tapping the rim, or a rim shot, or the stick-over-stick.

The cross stick is created by placing one end of the stick on the drum head while striking the rim with the other end of the stick. The first end remains stationary on the head and acts as a fulcrum while the other end moves up and down. It is often helpful to leave the heel of the hand on the drum head with the end of the stick. Getting a really good, high pitched, woodblock-like sound requires the drummer to (a) turn the stick around backwards, using the tip as the stationary fulcrum, and (b) experiment with fulcrum placement on the drum head to find the highest, clearest, most resonant sound.

Cross Stick Video

Count Basie albums and Miles’ Kind of Blue are great places to find examples of clean cross stick sounds for your students. For more contemporary sounds, check out most of Jack Johnson’s album On and On or dig on “Didn’t Cha Know” from Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun.

Entry Filed under: Percussion Tools, Tips and Techniques