Single, double and paradiddle strokes sticking patterns in drumming
Types of hand movements/combinations involved in creating and syncopating your drum rolls
“How do you play such clean, neat single stroke roll at 200 bpm?”, I asked the drum tutor in my first class. “I…I just do.”, was the reply.
Drum terminology 1: r denotes a right hand soft stroke, R denotes a right hand accented/loud stroke. Similarly l, L denote left hand soft, loud strokes.
Sticking patterns
In the world of drumming, single, double and paradiddle strokes are the most important rudiments. In their simplest forms, single stroke is rlrl-rlrl, double stroke is rrll-rrll and paradiddle stroke is rlrr-lrll
You can put together these sticking patterns around the drum kit to make up your fills or just syncopate the accents in just one pattern. The sticking patterns are just muscle memory — keep playing till your fingers bleed! (just kidding :P — keep playing till you no longer have to put in conscious effort to play them and don’t forget the metronome!) Today we will concentrate on syncopation of accents in all 3 patterns.
Drum terminology 2: We will be using a 4/4 time signature all through this article to make up our fills, i.e.; every bar has 4 quarter notes. Time signatures and note values are huge topics in themselves! If anyone wants articles on those please comment below.
Let us take the above roll in which every quarter note is accented and all other notes are ghost notes. Using the terminology, single stroke roll sticking pattern is Rlrl-Rlrl-Rlrl-Rlrl, double stroke roll sticking pattern is Rrll-Rrll-Rrll-Rrll and paradiddle stroke roll sticking pattern is Rlrr-Lrll-Rlrr-Lrll
Primary strokes
Drumming consists of 4 primary strokes — full(F), down(D), tap(t), up(u).
- Full Stroke — Hold the stick at 90 degrees angle, hit the drum and let stick bounce back to 90 degrees angle.
- Down Stroke — Hold the stick at 90 degrees angle, hit the drum and stop the bounce at 15 degrees angle.
- Tap Stroke — Hold the stick at 15 degrees angle, hit the drum and bring it back to 15 degrees angle.
- Up Stroke — Hold the stick at 15 degrees angle, hit the drum and bring it back to 90 degrees angle.
In theory, we use 90 and 15 degree values. But based on your speed the values might vary. Note that the full & down strokes always give accented notes compared to tap & up strokes.
One good hand motion that lets you incorporate these strokes nice and smooth into your muscles is the Moeller Technique. In that technique, you whip your stick to hit a down stroke and you hit an up stroke while you pull it back up. You can hit a tap stroke in between these two hand motions.
Once you get all the four strokes into your muscle memory, you can start building your rolls with them.
Sticking patterns to strokes translation
In our above roll we want every 4th note to be accented which means every 4th note needs to be either full or a down stroke and the remaining ghost notes can be tap or up strokes.
Our single stroke roll sticking pattern has every alternate right hand stroke accented so the best combination to get that going would be a down stroke on accents and an up stroke on ghost notes. Why? If you replace the down stroke with full stroke, the ending position of the accented note will be at 90 degrees which is not equal to the required starting position of either tap or up stroke which is 15 degrees to achieve the next ghost note. Similarly, if you have a tap stroke for ghost notes the ending position would be 15 degrees which is not starting position of either full or down stroke that is required to make the next accented note. All left hand strokes are ghost notes so we can have tap strokes on all of them.
Rlrl-Rlrl-Rlrl-Rlrl translates to Dtut-Dtut-Dtut-Dtut
With the same logic we can derive the strokes involved in double stroke roll sticking pattern as
Rrll-Rrll-Rrll-Rrll translates to Dutt-Dutt-Dutt-Dutt
and paradiddle stroke roll sticking pattern as
Rlrr-Lrll-Rlrr-Lrll translates to Dutt-Dutt-Dutt-Dutt
Full strokes are generally used when you have consecutive accents on the same hand. For example, if you syncopate the single stroke roll sticking pattern to RlRl-RlRl-RlRl-RlRl, it would translate to FtFt-FtFt-FtFt-FtFt.
More examples…
Lets do a fun exercise where we take the single stroke roll sticking pattern and syncopate it further.
- RlrL-RlrL-rlRL-rlrl translates to DuuD-DutD-uuDD-ttut
- rlRL-RlrL-rlRL-rLrl translates to uuFD-DutD-uuDF-tDtt
- rlrl-RLRL-rlRL-rlRL translates to ttuu-FFDD-uuDD-uuDD
Exercises that can help you understand these further…
- Take the double and paradiddle stroke sticking patterns. Syncopate them as you like and translate them into strokes.
- After you get a good understanding of the strokes, please move on to the more complex rudiments. Here is a YouTube playlist of all 40 drum rudiments.
- After you try these on practise pad or snare drum, move them around the kit. (I’m sure you would be surprised to see how many musical variations you can do with just the rudiments and syncopations!)
Thank you for following through till the end. I hope it was fun. Please leave any comments/suggestions you have for me and do leave any interesting syncopated patterns that you discover along the way. You can follow me on medium or also on my YouTube Channel for more fun drumming stuff.
Drum on! Cheers! :)
