The Packet
General Info
Subtitle: A Fundamentals-Based Percussion Curriculum
Year: 2015
Publisher: FECIV Publications
Difficulty: Elementary to Advanced
Cost: $29.99
Dimensions: 30.48 x 22.86 x 2.54 cm
ISBN: 978-0-6925-0069-9
Instrumentation
Overview
- Etudes, Exercises, and Variations for 6th-12th Grade
- Based on Fundamentals
- Simple and Straightforward
Description
The Packet by Frank Chapple is a collection of exercises, etudes and instructions written to help students develop the skills necessary to be a complete percussionist. Designed for use with all students from middle school all the way until high school graduation, this book is a straightforward way to get your kids drumming correctly. Written by Michael Dooley
Chapter
Chapter 1: The Rhythms section helps students understand basic rhythmic concepts like the quarter note, all the way up to doing hand speed changes with pentuplets.
Chapter 2: Chops works on the physical act of hitting a drum, including legato strokes, staccato strokes, rudiments, and accent patterns.
Chapter 3: Rudiments shows students how to play the most essential sticking patterns every drummer should know, all the way up to how to play grids with hybrid rudiments.
Chapter 4: Mallets begins with note naming and ends with four-mallet triple lateral exercises.
Chapter 5: Drum Set shows students basic patterns and styles all the way up to a 12/8 nanigo.
Reviews
Organization: Acknowledgements precede the Table of Contents which is simply listed in seven sections: Introduction and Sections 1-6, which cover Rhythm, Chops, Rudiments, Mallets, Drumset, and Assignments Charts, with no page numbers listed for any chapters since there are no page numbers anywhere in the book. Each chapter has multiple subsections, with each chapter seeming to progress in order of ascending difficultly, although the order of the chapters does not seem to follow this same pattern. Most of the sections consist of playing exercises, but the last section is nothing but twenty-nine pages of a copy/paste table that could have been included in a short paragraph elsewhere in the book or recreated with notebook paper.
Content: The content in this book seems to be curated for marching band, as most of the examples in the book apply to snare drum, with the Mallets and Drumset sections being used by front ensemble members. That being said, I was surprised to find no sections for cymbals or other drums. There is a strong emphasis on counting as listed in the Introduction section, with the Rhythm section containing mostly exercises in which the student counts rests and introduces playing and stickings. The Chops section focuses mostly on strokes, with Rudiments being self-explanatory, as well as Mallets and Drumset. Scales and short etudes for all major and natural minor scales are available in the Mallets section which could be helpful, along with popular rhythms in the Drumset section.
Uses: This book would be best used in a marching band setting, or perhaps by elementary to middle school instructors. The fundamentals that this book focuses on is primarily centered around concepts which are valued or worked on the most in marching band settings, and the background of the author supports this despite the author’s experience and background in public schools.
Rating: At first, I thought this book was a snare drum book! Its presentation, along with valued fundamentals, led me to believe that this book was only focused on snare drum. It does not even try to mention any other instruments apart from snare drum, mallets which themselves are unspecified, and drum set. The entirety of this book seems like it belongs in a section to a greater method book, which the author did say in some way in his defense in the beginning of the book, in which he strongly recommends the use of this book along with many other literature and method books. There are so many concepts missing that it is easier to say what this book covers than what it does not. 1/5. User:Hondogracias