Hands Exercise: Singles with Accents

Below is a great exercise created by our teacher Madi for any of the beginner drummers out there. It focuses on improving accents in a single stroke roll and developing independence between your right and left hand.

Key points to focus on while practicing this exercise:

• Maintain even/equal stick height and consistent sounding strokes between both hands

• Maintain good technique (stick grip, rebound and control)

Tip: Try playing your non-accented notes a little quieter, this will help to make sure your accents sound more prominent while practicing.

Hands Exercise-Singles with Accents

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6-Stroke Roll Exercise

One of my favourite ways to increase hand speed and dexterity is by practicing the 6-stroke roll. In my opinion it's one of the best sounding rudiments and is by far the most fun to play. The exercise I've provided below incorporates all four different variations of this rudiment into a 4 bar phrase.

I strongly recommend moving this exercise around the kit once you've built up confidence with it. I think you'll find that it's a great exercise for creating unique sounding drum fills.

Hope that helps!

Jack

6 Stroke Roll Exercise

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Why Your Drumming Is NOT Improving (and how to fix it)

There are countless reasons for why your progress behind the kit may be stagnant at the moment. In this short post I will explain the biggest reason for this from my own personal experience; witnessing it first hand in my own practicing, and in some of my students.

PRACTICE VS. MAINTENANCE

One of the biggest reasons you may have stopped progressing as a drummer is because what you think is "practice" is really just maintenance.

By maintenance, I mean you are just sharpening and *maintaining* what you already know how to play, so you don't forget how to play it and don't lose the muscle memory for how to physically play it.

Where as practice on the other hand, is the slow and painful process of figuring out and developing something completely new to your playing.

As a general rule of thumb (not to be taken too literally):

If it sounds good, it's maintenance. If it sounds absolutely terrible, it's practice.

Hope that helps!

Jack