Lesson 8: Rudiments on the kit
The single paradiddle from the practice pad to the drums: as a groove with the hands split between hi-hat and snare, and as a fill around the toms — one sticking, three sounds.
Rudiments are the vocabulary of drumming, and a rudiment on the pad is a word you have learned to spell. This lesson is about saying it: one sticking, the single paradiddle, taken onto the kit three ways.
Watch first
On the pad
Right left right right, left right left left. Accent the first note of each group. It is the most useful sticking in drumming because it swaps the leading hand every four notes without you having to think about it.
Get it clean at 70 before you go any further. Clean means the doubles (the “R R” and “L L”) are as even as the singles, and the accents are the only loud notes.
As a groove
Put the right hand on the hi-hat and the left on the snare, and play the paradiddle as sixteenths. The hat plays where the right hand falls and the snare where the left does. Add the kick on one and three. The snare notes that land on two and four are the backbeats; play them full. The rest of the left hand’s notes are ghost notes.
Listen to how the hi-hat pattern is no longer straight eighths. That is the paradiddle doing your thinking for you; you did not have to invent a hat pattern, the sticking made one.
As a fill
Now the right hand on the hi tom and the left on the snare. Same sticking, and the accents move round the kit on their own. Four paradiddles are a bar; play three beats of groove and one paradiddle as the fill, or a whole bar of them before the chorus.
Try the right hand on the floor tom instead, then on the ride. Same fill, three different sounds. That is what a rudiment gives you: one thing to practise, many things to play.
The next four
The rudiment trainer has all forty with the sticking played back. After the paradiddle, learn these in order: the double stroke roll, the flam, the five stroke roll and the single stroke four. Each has a page with the notation, the sound and a way to practise it.
Practise
Five minutes on the pad at 70, five on the groove at 80, five on the fill. Then put the groove on the “a” of two kick from lesson five and see what happens. The trainer opens on the paradiddle at 70.
Practise this now
- Play the paradiddle at 70 BPM →The tool opens with this lesson's numbers already dialled in.
- Open the groove in the Groove Lab →Hear it on the lab's drums, slow it down with ½ speed, then change one thing.
- Log the session →Minutes, the tempo you reached, how it felt. The streak is the habit forming.
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