Snare Accents
A random one-bar reading exercise for the snare drum.
In 4/4 time, a single bar holds 16 sixteenth notes — four per pulse. Each note is either accented (louder) or unaccented, so a bar has 216 = 65,536 possible accent patterns. One is drawn at random below. Inspired by the interpretation practice in Ted Reed's Syncopation for the Modern Drummer.
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How to read the bar
The pattern is written in 4/4 time on a five-line staff. The two vertical strokes at the left are the percussion clef, and the stacked 4s are the time signature — four quarter-note beats per bar.
Each filled notehead is a sixteenth note played on the snare drum. They are joined into four beamed groups of four — one group per beat — and the double beam marks them as sixteenths.
A > above a note is an accent: play that note louder. Notes without a > are played softer. Read left to right, keeping the kick-drum pulse steady as your metronome.
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