Ratamacoups with different feels

Ratmacoups With Different Feels consists of just one ratamacue-based breakdown that will be taken in a few different directions to challenge your hands, feet, eyes, ears, and brain. Although the ratamacue rudiments are rarely written in modern battery percussion music, these patterns will have tremendous relevance and demand for stick control, doublestroke, roll timing, and singlestroke fundamentals. Working on these patterns will pay dividends for your more broadly-applied drumming skills, while also giving you a more comprehensive understanding of one of the classic 26 essential rudiments.

The last two pages of this rudiment study consist of exercises with a variable written “mark time” component, much like the exercises you will find in the free book Mark Time Mark, also available on this website. In fact, I wrote this exercise before I wrote that book, and it was in writing this exercise that I got the idea for the book! But life happens, and it happens a lot, so I haven’t gotten around to re-visiting this rudiment study and fleshing out all the explanatory verbiage until now.

Bed 'o Taps fo' Better Taps

Bed ‘o Taps Fo’ Better Taps was inspired by an experience I had while walking through a warm-up lot somewhere in Utah, once upon a time. I heard a snare line playing some 8 and 25 on some beautifully-tuned Pearl snare drums, and it was just about the most amazing thing I had ever heard. Then they played some two-height rolls stuff, and it was like I was hearing a completely different group of performers. Obviously, two-height roll patterns tend to present more challenges than monotone rolls, but why? This pair of exercises seeks to explore this question.

These two exercises are intended to bridge the gap between roll fundamentals and accent-tap fundamentals. It is very common that players who have painstakingly developed sufficient stroke velocity and fulcrum control for playing quality doublestroke rolls will nevertheless find those habits affected by the addition of accents to create two-height figures, like paradiddles and tap rolls.

Chocolate Mitchells 2021

Chocolate Mitchells 2021 includes various passages for rehearsing variations of paradiddle rudiments that cram an extra accent into the pattern.

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

Disjunct Motion

Disjunct Motion was written in contrast to Weber State's Conjunct Motion exercise, which used doublestops to work on legato fundamentals. In this exercise, the rebound/cushion dichotomy is explored with the non-lead hand in different contexts that will depend on tempo for clear definition. The point is that sometimes it is best to rebound, sometimes it is best to cushion, and in some cases it is best to allow the stroke a slower rebound to fill the time up between strokes.