Swissin' Vert

Swissin’ Vert works on inverted swiss army triplets, allowing you to feel the rudiment in the context of other comfortable figures while avoiding the challenges to endurance and relaxation that are posed by rehearsing multiple consecutive instances of the rudiment. Use the crescendo variations to build comfort with the rudiment without the huge upstroke required in the decrescendo variations. Adding backsticks raises awareness of fulcrum construction.

Additional pages include further description and supplemental exercises

Stutter Tap Fives

Stutter Tap-Fives challenges you to control the placement of doublestrokes in tap-five figures. The main variation plays with the space around the doublestroke. It is very tricky to play a quality doublestroke that doesn’t follow from something and connect to something else. It should not be, but it is, so use it as an excuse to get very picky about how you articulate doublestrokes! If shuffling these diddles around the rhythmic grid gets boring, the modulation variations challenge you to change doublestroke placement and speed.

The included buzz/crush variations allow you to work on many of the same challenges as the main variations—rhythmic precision and the targeted application of fulcrum pressure—without having to worry about second note placement on the doublestrokes.

Movin' Mills

Movin’ Mills is a simply-created grid that makes for a lot of weirdness with the hands. Get picky about your grace note placement and get comfortable with the stickings… then speed things up and try to keep everything nice and relaxed. I dare you!

Touch Doubles

Touch Doubles is a basic doublestroke exercise with some variations that will draw your attention to the second note of each doublestroke, so you can really examine how your hands work to create quality doubles. To overcome tendencies to play weak second notes, you are invited to explore the opposite extreme: make the second note of each double stronger than the first, either by increasing its height, or by increasing the stick velocity while attacking from the same height.

I pulled this exercise off the cutting room floor of the NC State Drumline exercise packet… I recently found a very early handwritten draft that included several exercises which, despite not making the cut, are actually quite versatile and worthy of study. This exercise does not lend itself well to a “drum camp” situation; it is more of a means to really get to know your own hands, requiring woodshedding, self-reflection, taking things nice and slow, and experimenting. The exercise of playing “Did Pat One” while maintaining a fully rebounded set position (something we did teach at the camps) was challenging enough, which is probably why this exercise didn’t make the cut.

Loosey Juicy

Loosey Juicy uses swiss triplets and different doublestroke rolls to contrast different applications where the second note of a double beat is achieved largely through fulcrum/finger pressure acting against the rebound of the first note of the doublestroke.

Nine on a Hand (Flam Drag Builder)

Nine on a Hand (Flam Drag Builder) is similar to Eighteen on a Hand, but it focuses on the distinction between taps and grace notes while drawing your attention to different features of the flam drag rudiment. Ideally, grace notes are played from the tacet height in order to create the best sounding flams possible; i.e., the grace note does not speak as powerfully as the taps or diddles. This approach is the flams equivalent of “doublestrokes consist of two equal attacks.” While the ideal will not always be feasible, understanding it and being able to apply it where it is reasonably achievable will improve your execution across the range of rudimental contexts.

Place The Grace 2

Place The Grace 2 is a flams builder that challenges you to keep a consistent pulse on one hand while the other hand plays isolated taps that either serve to fill in the rhythm, to create true flams, or to create flat flams.

Place The Grace 1

Place The Grace 1 is a flams builder that challenges you to experiment with grace-note placement by starting with a rhythmic grid, altering the timing of the rhythmic grid, transitioning to true flams, tightening to flat flams, and ultimately settling on a true flam interpretation.

Chugga-Chugga-Wuggas

Chugga-Chugga-Wuggas is an introduction to some fun flam, flam-tap, and inverted flam-tap combinations that can function as hybrid rudiments. They require a great deal of control, finesse, and advanced flam fundamentals, where raw chops have to meet mature touch awareness. Enjoy!

Full 'o Crumb

Full ‘o Crumb challenges your control of fulcrum pressure and finger assistance by juxtaposing singlestrokes, doublestrokes, and flam-taps. It will require a lot of dexterity to switch between the demands of the different rudiments.

Herta Henry

Herta Henry is a fun singlestroke and herta étude that is a lot more challenging than it looks. You will have to mind what I call the “herta paradox”: hertas consist simply of legatos on one hand and doubles on the other hand, but putting them together in the herta rhythm mysteriously creates a tendency to unnecessarily tense up on both figures in order to achieve correct timing. The skeleton variation will give you a benchmark of how the as-written exercise should feel if you are truly relaxed.

2/28 Spree

2/28 Spree is a spree that I wrote with the help of the WSIP 2015 snare line after a particularly brutal visual block. I wanted to keep the performers off their feet, so we hashed out this piece using sticks on a carpeted floor, and it turned into something quite cool. So here is the WSIP 2015 snare line spree.

Chocolate Mitchells 2015

Chocolate Mitchells 2015 was written for a specific context of show music, hence the overly-specific height definitions when the different rudiments are all put together. "Chocolate Mitchells" were our name for the rudiment you get when a paradiddle or paradiddle-diddle figure gets an extra note that is accented, and it is filled into the same amount of space. Mitchell Barnard wrote quite a few of these figures for WSIP's 2015 production, so we used this exercise to build the rudiment and then apply it to the musical context.

Upstroke March

Upstroke March is an étude for working on comfort and consistency with the quick upstrokes you will encounter in various flam and singlestroke patterns.  Often, with quick upstrokes, you either lighten up the taps before the upstroke, and they sound weak, or you smack the crap out of the accent after it, and it sounds more harsh than other accents in the phrase.  By putting even more taps and accents around the upstroke, you have something for your ears to compare it to, which should help you to develop better habits with quick upstrokes.

Painkillers

Ready to reef some fast beats? Painkillers presents three variations for pushing your speed and relaxation at the same time, with fours, paradiddles, and singlestroke rolls. The demand eases up as the exercise goes on, but you should not take that as an excuse to lose quality or precision. The pattern is inspired by the drumming of Scott Travis on the ripping opener of Judas Priest's 1990 Painkiller album.

Huevos Huackos

Huevos Huackos is an eggbeater exercise that works the rudiment in the context of straight 16th-notes before adding 5:4 and 5:3 tuplets and ultimately throwing in backsticks. 

Backsticks in eggbeaters are a little tricky, but they can be a lot of fun. The secret is to relax the left-hand fulcrum (where you clamp the stick in the web of the hand between the thumb and forefinger) and let the stick slide out a little bit, so that your fulcrum consists more of the actual thumb and forefinger gripping the stick. This allows you to still get the diddles with the bead of the stick while being able to flip to the butt and engage the back fulcrum to get two quality backsticks. Backsticked diddles generally require a back-fulcrum approach, because the front fulcrum doesn't have enough stick in front of it to get a good rebound. By moving the fulcrum for the non-backsticked diddles, you make it easier to make a quick switch to that back fulcrum to get diddles with both grips (see photos below).

Grace-Notes Under Pressure

Grace-Notes Under Pressure is an alternative to hardcore gridding as a means of getting comfortable with different grace-note and diddle combinations. It's a basic 7/4 pattern with a systematic walkthrough of flam and drag combinations. The juxtaposition of flam-paradiddle variations with flam-accent variations should challenge you to stay loose and relaxed as you add the "ornaments" (grace-notes and diddles) with variable amounts of fulcrum pressure.

Hucka Dig Deep

Hucka Dig Deep is a fulcrum teaser that challenges your mastery of diddle speed control.  Varying diddle speeds as well as varying spaces available for upstrokes will expose your shortcomings in the complicated marriage of accent/tap fundamentals and doublestroke fundamentals that paradiddle rudiments demand.

Cheese-5 Gritty

Cheese-5 Gritty is an exercise for building precision and consistency with flam-fives... and getting down to the nitty gritty of flam-fives. It focuses on the second diddle releasing on an eighth-note upbeat and works on the slight contrast between grace-note height (tacet height, or "1/2 inch") and tap height (often called "3 inches"). While achieving this contrast is infeasible as tempo increases, it is an important ideal to understand, build on, and strive for. 

The analogy I use is that, with doublestrokes, we strive for two completely equal motions at slower tempi, even though that becomes infeasible as tempo increases.  And even at the quicker tempi, by thinking about those two equal motions and getting more sound out of the second note, we get more doublestroke quality without actually reaching that ideal of "two equal motions". Flams are the same way. Oftentimes, by simply thinking about that grace-note being "underneath" the taps, we control it just that little bit more to get it low enough and early enough to create a good-sounding flam.

Lead-Dubs Chuggada

Lead-Dubs Chuggada is an exercise inspired by the 5/8 Chuggada which runs through three rudiments that all have [roughly] the same lead-hand breakdown: Swiss triplet, off-hand Swiss w/ kick, and hertas. The idea is that most of the brain-work happens with the off-hand, although there is slight variation in timing and stick height with the double-beats on the lead hand as well.