Drum Workshop: More Stick Control!

Because you can’t have to much…

I was checking out a John Riley clip over at Jon McCaslin’s always excellent Four on the Floor blog the other day and I was reminded of something I was messing around with a while back.

It’s pretty straight forward. Take the first column of Stick Control and play the R’s on the bass drum and the L’s on the snare with your left hand. Keep time on the cymbal and play the Hi Hat on two and four.

Now what you do is take each pattern through three different subdivisions. Start with straight eights for four measures, then eighth note triplets and finally sixteenth notes. You’ll have to adjust your cymbal beat so that you are using a dotted eighth/sixteenth note figure for the straight eighths and sixteenth notes.

Here’s what the first five exercises sound like:

Drum Workshop

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I like this exercise for the endurance, coordination and most importantly for the mental challenge of changing subdivisions. Make sure you start slow enough so that the sixteenth notes don’t break you!

JC

• January 24, 2012
• Drum Nerds
• 1 comment