Strictly Technique
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Pataflafla Builder - Exercises for Developing a Challenging Yet Musical Rudiment
One of the most beneficial of the forty PAS rudiments is the pataflafla. It’s one of the few where each hand plays a totally different part. The leading hand uses what I call the Moeller whip-and-stop technique, and the secondary…
Strictly Technique: Understanding Flams
The ability to freely and easily embellish rhythmic figures with single grace notes and create "flams," is to me one of the earmarks of an accomplished snare drummer. Such accomplishment does not always come easily, but the following observations may…
Strictly Technique: Extending Stick Control
Stick Control by George L. Stone is perhaps the most widely accepted text on "pure" technique for snare drum. However, many drum set players of very high caliber have also mentioned this book as a constant study source. TO READ…
Strictly Technique: Top 10 Rudiments
The drag is the tenth and final rudiment in our series. If you’ve been practicing these rudiments and exercises correctly, at a wide variety of tempos, then your hands are now trained with all of the necessary motions required to…
Dynamics Mechanics - Loud, Soft, and Everything in Between
Strictly Technique Dynamics Mechanics Loud, Soft, and Everything in Between by Bill Bachman I believe that a drummer should be able to pick up sticks and make music on any sound source. The two biggest keys to doing this are…
Strictly Technique: Triplet Gear-Shifter
This month we’re going to apply two alternate stickings to the triplet gear-shifter exercise. To review, 12th notes are 8th-note triplets (twelve notes to a bar of 4/4). In the exercise, a bar of 12th notes is followed by a…
Strictly Technique - The Missing Stickings
The inspiration for this article came from years of studying out of George Lawrence Stone’s Stick Control for the Snare Drummer. TO READ THE FULL STORY: SUBSCRIBE TO ACCESS LOG IN
Strictly Technique - Part 1: Volume and Accent Character
Most of us tackled basic rudimental patterns when we first learned to play the drums. For me, these endless combinations were fun to practice, but I soon wondered why I would choose to play a more complex sticking when I…
Strictly Technique - Playing the Sixes
It can be difficult to get young students to feel excited about sitting down and working on rudiments. The material in this two-part series is designed to encourage drummers to dig into some of the basic rudimental sticking patterns and…
Strictly Technique - Chops Builders: Hemiolas, Part 1
This month we’re going to start a three-part series on hemiolas. The word hemiola has Greek roots and means “containing one and a half,” “half as much again,” or “in the ratio of one and a half to one (3:2),…
Strictly Technique - Chops Builders
In part two of our hemiola series, we’re going to add another accent to the half-note-triplet patterns we covered last month. To review, a hemiola is defined as a two-against-three (2:3) or three-against-two (3:2) pattern. TO READ THE FULL STORY:…
Strictly Technique - Chops Builders: Hemiolas, Part 3
In this final installment of our hemiola series, we’re going to add yet another accent to the half-note-triplet patterns we covered in parts one and two. Part one had one accented note within the three groupings of four 8th-note triplets,…
Following Groupings and Fill-Ins with Bill Bachman
Strictly Technique Following Groupings and Fill-Ins Exercises for Increased Single-Stroke Control by Bill Bachman This month we’re going to work on playing flowing groupings of notes with one hand while gradually filling in the spaces between the notes with the…
Pataflafla Hemiolas
Strictly Technique Pataflafla Hemiolas Straight and Alternating Versions Over Half-Note Triplets by Bill Bachman This month we’re going to add the pataflafla (a rudiment consisting of two adjacent flams) to some two-accent hemiola patterns to give us a rhythmic and…
