A question about timpani's

So this is a short but important question, when writing for timpani's is it possible for the timpanist to play chromatic notes in a fairly rapid succession or does he need time to adjust the pressure of the timpani? for example could he play 3 crochest of E, D Sharp, and C sharp at a fairly moderate speed? 

Do you want them to be accurate/do you want them to not sound like they're glissando-ing the entire time? Then not really, especially with a cluth-release drum. Pedal drum, I'm guessing it's possible, but they'd need to mute the drum after every hit, since the resonance will carry. Just write a gliss.

8 minutes ago, Monarcheon said:

Do you want them to be accurate/do you want them to not sound like they're glissando-ing the entire time? Then not really, especially with a cluth-release drum. Pedal drum, I'm guessing it's possible, but they'd need to mute the drum after every hit, since the resonance will carry. Just write a gliss.

 

Okay, thank you i dont want them to glis, i just want them to hit a single note.

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Late to the thread, but in case you're still wondering, or in case anyone else is, what you're asking is possible, but with caveats and provisos too many to list here. These are called pedal accents. Samuel Barber did this in Medea's Dance of Vengeance, Wuorien in his Bassoon Variations, Carter in 8 Pieces for 4 Timpani, and John Williams in the original Star Wars main title. When it gets faster than (roughly) the Barber example, you're venturing into articulated gliss territory. (Pardon the shameless plug, but I wrote the book on scoring for timpani, which you can find in my signature below.)

Check out Randy Max playing his timpani adaptation of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to get an idea of some possibilities. But again, you have to know what you're doing to write this and you have to be certain your timpanist is up to caliber, and you have to be certain that the part can be learned within the timeframe the timpanist is certain to have. So writing something like this for a studio session where the timpanist is only now just seeing the part would be a disaster. In the John Williams case, his brother played the timpani part, so he might've know about it beforehand, and it was just a descending F mixolydian scale across three drums (which, by the way, requires the timpanist to sit rather than stand).

Anyway, the Randy Max piece has a series of articulated glissandos and pedal accents. You can buy the score from him.