Here at last is my opinionated commentary on each of the 40 PAS international drum rudiments— the good are praised, the questionable are denigrated and hounded from the public sphere. The abstruse are eschewed. I’ll […]
Category: rudiments
Flam combinations in 6/8
Way too many wordy posts recently, with more coming, so let’s do a simple page of flam exercises in 6/8— in a triplet feel. Like p. 34 in Stick Control, but more robust. Whenever I […]
Preparation for Reed triplet studies
A page of short triplet exercises that are preparation for some of the major practice methods I do with the book Syncopation: the right handed solo method, and the so-called “Ruff Bossa” method, found in […]
Three Camps in 6-stroke rolls
For awhile I was campaigning to get this RLLRRL sticking called “Swiss sixtuplets”, based on an overheard conversation from drum corps days, when George Tuthill and Alan Kristensen, two corps legends, were talking about rudiments. […]
Rudiments in 5/8
A page of snare drum rudiment practice phrases, written in 5/8, in a 3+2 phrasing. Keep this with your copy of Haskell Harr (book 2) or Rudimental Swing Solos. These can all be played at […]
Stick Control flams in 5/8 – 01
This is pretty straightforward, almost something you can do without writing it out— I’ve simply transcribed the basic flam exercises from p. 16 of Stick Control into 5/8. I get bored practicing things in a […]
Open ratamacues for drumset
More jazz solo vocabulary: my previous page of open ratamacues, adapted for the drumset. It’s pretty simple: we’ve just moved the doubles to the bass drum. I eliminated the triple ratamacues because I don’t like […]
Open ratamacues – 01
Anyone know what the story is with ratamacues? I don’t get it. Why a ruff on a 16th note triplet? As a fundamental sticking pattern they’re ungainly, and as musical vocabulary they’re ill-defined, tensionless blobs […]
Chop busters in 5/8 – 01
Hey, two odd meter things in two days. I’ve really turned around my thinking on the value of this subject— it really forces you to have a heightened awareness of rhythm, which is a good […]
Left handed rudimental study – 01
This relates to my old, old same handed flam accents post, and my more recent left hand lead developer post. This is very left hand-intensive, with a lot of those same-handed flam accents I like […]
Three camps – alternative versions
Here are some different forms of the snare drum piece Three Camps— actually we’ve seen them all before, except for the last one: See this page which breaks down the piece to see how these […]
Hand motions for Stone flam studies
It’s a funny thing, there’s endless online conversation about how to play an open roll, and virtually nothing about flams. They’re off the radar for some reason. And with the book Stick Control, NOBODY every […]