Variations for Grooves, Fills, and Solos Rudiments are generally some of the first things we all learn when we start our drumming journey. I found them tedious and boring at first, and honestly sometimes I still do. It wasn’t until I became comfortable with a few of them and started experimenting with their figures in my everyday playing that I finally started to believe that my teachers were actually on to something! Rudiments can essentially be described as groupings of single and double strokes in different configurations and rhythms. So it’s no mystery that with enough practice, they can become second-nature vocabulary of the language we learn to speak so fluently with our hands and feet. One of my favorite rudiments is the inverted paradiddle-diddle, which is often commonly referred to as the six-stroke roll. Let’s take a paradiddle-diddle, which has a sticking of RLRRLL or LRLLRR, and shift the […]

October 2019 Issue