Standard Of Excellence 1 Percussion

Getting Through Book 1 of Standard Of Excellence Without Losing Your Mind

I have used Standard Of Excellence 1 Percussion with multiple starting bands over the years, and it is a solid foundation if you understand what it is actually good for and where it falls apart. The method assumes you are teaching students who have never held a mallet before. That is fine. It is also fine if you have three kids who already play piano and one kid who has never heard a drum set in his life. The book handles both situations, but it does not handle them equally well. The book covers rudiment basics, mallet technique on snare, timpani, and tuned percussion, and xylophone/bells. It introduces reading staff notation gradually, which is important because most band directors do not have time to teach music theory separately. The exercises progress from single strokes to paradiddles, and the etudes that come later give students something musical to play instead of just drills. Here is the thing most first-year teachers miss. The book assumes you are playing these etudes at tempos the students can manage. If you rush through the pieces to check boxes on a rehearsal planner, you will lose them. I have seen directors push students to complete Chapter 4 before the snare grip is actually correct. It happens every year. Take the time to check grips. A wrong grip learned in Chapter 2 comes back to haunt you in Chapter 8 when the tempo increases and everything falls apart.

One specific problem I run into regularly involves the timed warm-ups. The book includes metronome markings and timed exercises for building speed. I had a student last year who was hitting every target on paper but producing weak, uncontrolled sounds. The issue was not speed. It was that he was playing from his wrists instead of his fingers with proper rebound. I stopped using the timed exercise entirely and switched to playing each repetition at half tempo with full attention to stick height and relaxation. He made more progress in twenty minutes that way than he had in three weeks of following the book as written. The book does not address this. You have to. Another area where the book is useful but incomplete is the drum set section. It introduces basic grooves with notation, but it does not cover feel or groove in any real way. Students can read the rhythms correctly and still sound stiff. I supplement with clapping exercises and simple backing tracks. Nothing fancy. Just having them play along to something gives the patterns actual context instead of making them feel like abstract pencil exercises. The tuned percussion chapters work well if your school has actual instruments to match. I have dealt with programs where the xylophones are missing bars or the bells are out of tune by enough to make intonation impossible to teach. In those cases, you can still use the method. You just adapt. If you do not have enough instruments, rotate groups. Have half the class play while the other half reads and sings. Singing the lines first makes a noticeable difference when they pick up the mallets.

Timpani instruction in this book is concise. It covers pedal coordination and basic rolls, which is appropriate for a first book. If you want students to develop real timpani skill, this is the starting point, not the full curriculum. Follow it with more focused exercises on dynamics, tuning speed, and roll technique. The book gives you the framework. You build the rest around it. One downside I want to be honest about. Standard Of Excellence 1 Percussion does not include much in the way of ensemble playing for percussionists in the early chapters. Most of the etudes are solo. Band directors need to pair these with full band parts as soon as possible. A student practicing their book in isolation will sound lost when they try to play with the group. I schedule the first full band rehearsal with the percussion part within the first month. It keeps the context real. There is also the issue of practice tracking. The book does not have a built-in practice log, but I require students to fill one out weekly. It is simple. Date, exercise name, tempo achieved, and one thing they need to work on next time. I collect them every Friday. Ten minutes a week keeps students honest without taking much time away from instruction.

If your program has limited resources, the method is still viable. I have run successful beginners using borrowed mallets and a single snare drum shared between two students. The book is not dependent on having a full percussion inventory from day one. You just have to be creative about access and rotating students through different instruments. The concepts are the same regardless of what they are hitting. Most students finish Book 1 within a school year if you meet regularly. Some need more time. That is normal. A few students who came in with prior experience will breeze through the early chapters and get bored. Give those kids additional reading material or let them work on ensemble passages early. Keeping them engaged matters more than staying perfectly aligned with the book order. The downloadable version of the method is available through the publisher's website. You will need to verify your instructor status to access the supplementary materials. The core book content is also available in print, which some programs prefer for distribution to students. Either format works. The content is identical.

At the end of the day, Standard Of Excellence 1 Percussion is a teaching tool. It is not a substitute for your own judgment about how to use it. Pay attention to what is actually happening in your room. Adjust the tempo, change the order when it helps, skip the sections that are not serving your students, and reinforce the ones that are. That is how you get results.