Following the lead of Four On The Floor’s 5 Beat Groupings (including a hip way of using Stone on the drumset), and Trap’d’s 5 beat figures in triplets, here’s another variation of the paradiddle exercise […]
Category: rudiments
3.5-a-diddles
So-called because it consists of three and a half “paras” (RL RL RL R), plus a diddle (LL), and I… never mind. I was hitting the practice pad along with an Illinois Jacquet/Wild Bill Davis […]
Paradiddle round-up
In case you haven’t gotten enough to work on with the paradiddle things I’ve posted, here are some exercises gathered from around the web. I’ve only linked to pages that actually use notation- I’m a […]
Umdaga, part 1
This is a very simple pattern I use a lot- I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the basic DNA instructions of my playing: right/left/bass. I didn’t exactly make it up, but […]
Quick takes
– Jon McCaslin @ Four on the Floor shares this video of Marvin “Bugalu” Smith, who I had actually not heard of before. He was in Sun Ra’s and Archie Shepp’s bands in the 80’s. […]
Swiss triplets exercise
Here’s a fairly challenging swiss triplet exercise we used to play in my advanced practice pad group. The trickiest part seems to be the fourth line, with the 5/16 groupings comprised of a swiss triplet […]
Paradiddle shift with bass drum
This is something I’ve been working with, and finally had the time to write up. The paradiddle shift is a pretty common exercise involving the displacement of the paradiddle by one 16th note. Most people […]
How we used to learn the open roll
I just got a very nice note from Jim Buckley about the following comment of mine from the Drummerworld.com. Jim is a major figure in corps- he marched snare with Ghost in one of the […]
Matt’s paradiddle thing, pt. 2
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working a bunch with the paradiddle page I wrote up for my student Matt F, usually combining single repetitions of each exercise, as described in the post. Last night I […]
Todd’s methods: same-handed flam accents
This is something that came organically out of my own playing- it came up again and again in improvising for years before I finally analyzed it. The only place I’ve seen it mentioned since is […]
Rudimental drumming as conceptual art
Here’s a rudimental snare drum piece which I’ve been trying to get my head around for a couple of days now. Written by Ken Mazur, a champion drum corps soloist of the 70’s who went […]
The DNA of swing drumming
I picked up this interesting book- Charley Wilcoxon’s Drum Method– as one of my local sheet music stores was going out of business. I’d been working with Wilcoxon’s more advanced Rudimental Swing Solos, but this […]