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 […]
Category: rudiments
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 […]
Basic short roll studies with continuous motion
UPDATE: Download link is working! I’ve got to stop putting “EZ” on every single normal-difficulty thing I post. This is an easy page of roll studies I wrote to prepare a couple of younger students to […]
Countermanding the tsunami
Thanks to everyone who has purchased the new e-book, 13 Essential Stickings, and I hope you’re pleased with it. As you can see, there’s nothing in there you haven’t heard of— it’s really a case […]
Left hand lead developer – for soloing
In soloing I tend to lead with the left a lot, and play a lot of normally alternating flam rudiments in only left hand lead form— in the past I’ve shared a couple of different […]
Things other people say that I think are stupid
T.H.I.S. S.U.C.K.S. I’m sorry I said stupid. I just wanted you to read this. If you hang out on the internet a little bit, you start noticing patterns in people’s views about drumming, and that […]
Paradiddle-adiddle
This may already be a “hybrid” rudiment, but I wouldn’t know, because that is not my bag. I’ve posted a few modified paradiddle things in the past (like my “3.5-adiddle”), and this is a new one […]
Roy Haynes on rudiments
He talks about a lot of things, but his comments on rudiments (after 2:30) are interesting: I don’t know if I would take that completely at face value— in answering the question he seems to […]
Inverted paradiddle exercises
A page of paradiddle exercises, using the fun and hip RLLR/LRRL inversion. These are written in cut time, and can be played blazingly fast. You’ll notice that the 8th notes are all alternating, except most […]