Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for musicians, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm an amateur drummer but slightly less amateur with other instruments like guitar, piano and clarinet.
What's the difference between a grace note and flam?
As far as I can tell they're very similar, so is it just these terms are applied to different disciplines?
I think a flam is what you play, and a grace note is how it’s written in notation. Or, as I read on a drumming web page, the first, quieter part of a flam can be called ”grace note”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_note
What a grace note means, depends on the instrument and culture. For drums a note preceded by a grace note means flam. On other instruments it might mean a weaker extra ornament note preceding the main note, which may sound like a tiny slur.
It's basically the same idea. A flam is two notes: a grace note followed by a normal stroke. So only that first little note of semi-indeterminate duration is the grace note, not the whole two-note phrase.
