Playing the drums requires versatility and creativity as your hands and legs work in tandem and independently. This blog will showcase how you can get strong at your fundamentals and excel at playing the rudiments.

Rudiments – Your Gateway to Great Technique and Flow

Rudiments are more like letters. Notice how letters are important to form a sentence? Yes, playing any groove of any time signature requires knowledge and experience of playing rudiments. It doesn’t matter if you are not able to play fast from the get-go. To learn these basic essentials, we must start slow, get familiarised with time and then build up to playing fast.

Here is a secret for you – every single beat you will be learning in this course is based out of at least one of these rudiments. Now that you know where to start – let’s begin!

Single Stroke Rudiments

To start with, first we look into single stroke rudiments. Taking a quarter-note beat (1-2-3-4) as the foundation, a single stroke rudiment has a single stroke played with the right hand, single stroke with the left hand, single stroke again with the right hand and ending with a single stroke with the left hand. To be more precise, a single stroke is a single hit with either the left hand or the right hand on the snare drum.

If the single stroke on either hand does not have a similar sound or does not flow from the same height, that’s not a good start. Take it slow, keep it simple and when you feel comfortable with the strokes, try to speed it up.

Double Stroke Rudiments

Just as the name suggests, the double stroke rudiments are double strokes on the left and double strokes with the right hand. For all our rudiments, we take the standard 4/4 quarter note beat as a reference.

Now, when you count 1, you follow it up with 2 single strokes on the right hand, which is equal to a double stroke. Similarly, on 2, double stoke on the left hand, double strokes on the right hand on 3 and ending with a double stroke on the left hand on 4.

Keep in mind that when you play a double stroke, the gap in time between the two single strokes on the left and right hand must be the same. When you play your first double stroke with your right hand, ensure that the height from which you play them remains the same for all the strokes. If it is not as loud and clear as the first single stroke, you aren’t playing them right.

Paradiddle

The third and the final rudiment we are going to learn is the paradiddle – a combination of single strokes and double strokes. A single paradiddle is counted as a single stroke on the right hand, single stroke on the left hand and a double stroke on the right hand. The next half is the other way around – single stroke on the left hand, single stroke on the right hand and ending with a double stroke on the left hand.

Here is a depiction of all three rudiments put together in a rhythmic chart:

Ensure that you count out the notes loud to get a sense of timing for each of the rudiments. Before we move further with the next lesson, here is how you would count time signatures.

1. Quarter-Note: 1-2-3-4

2. Eighth-Note: 1-&-2-&-3-&-4-&

3. Sixteenth-Note: 1-e-&-a-2-e-&-a-3-e-&-a-4-e-&-a

Based on these time subdivisions, we now learn to play each of the rudiments one after the other. In the next blog post, we move on to learning how to count and play quarter note grooves.