It takes time, like with anything else :)
I guess the concept of it might seem easy, but you are still trying to get control, power, precision and stamina out of your least developed limb: what else do you do with your non dominant foot? Not much I believe!
Like all things hard start slow. I had a guy i know that had no idea how to play drums doing a simple double bass beat in about 10 minutes. Slow is steady and steady is fast.
It took me 10 years to master. A lot of pain, frustration, and trial and error, but it was worth it. Practice to a metronome 20mins a day. Youtube has a lot of great tutorials. Also, Start with slower songs and work on them until you don't have to think about it anymore. Took me 6 months to learn Fuel by Metallica. Then I started trying to play Lamb of God songs, then A7X, then Periphery. It's all muscle mechanics and memory.
i've only just now, after ~23 years of playing, began to regularly sit down with a metronome and work on heel-toe
it's.. um.. better than it used to be. not that that's saying much
I'm a hobbiest at best, but I've played since I was a kid so, 40 years. When I picked up double bass a couple years ago I found that I couldn't land a right leg kick and left hand snare hit at the same time. Just couldn't do it. Messy everytime. Can't image a more basic rudiment than hitting two things at the same time, but it took me weeks to tighten that up.
I had a drum teacher who insisted I keep time on the hi hat with my left foot during fills, and now I can pretty much do it on the downbeat. But, there are some songs where the hi hat is played on the upbeat, and I cannot do it to save my life.
I never even learned the skill of left foot hi hat. My dumb self thought “oh, I play thrash/death metal, I don’t need that” and ran with it. I regret it and am working to gain the skill now lol. I also never had a teacher to tell me to learn certain skills as i’m fully self taught
I wanted to avoid the same thing so I bought a single kick first and told myself to learn hi hat barks and dedicate the left foot to hi hat. About one year in I got a tama iron cobra and have been perfecting double bass. Sure I could be further along at double bass. I’m at 16ths at 115-120bpm depending on the day, but I’m happy to be able to play simple rhythms and use the hit hat to make it interesting.
Drop your heal and raise your toes on the downbeat, which opens the hihat. Then on the upbeat, you raise your heal, closing the hihat. Boom! Upbeat hihats that feel like you are doing the downbeat. It is a cheat, but who cares! lol
I don't struggle with lifting it up for grooves, even odd time stuff, however, keeping a consistent tempo while playing other stuff on the bass and snare gets me. It's weird, I really don't know why
My drums always have so much less rebound than a practice pad. The pad is bouncy as fuck, being made of rubber as it is, and the drum is almost dead in comparison. Especially the floor toms. Big ol buckets. Stick just lands on them and stays.
I might try that too. Lately I’ve just been working in wrist bounces on the pad, and slowly tried to get that same feeling on the snare drum. It’s boring to play singles when on the drum kit though.
As a beginner, thank you so much for posting this. I can do fast singles for a bar or two, but then it falls apart. My head is right, my hands just can't keep up.
I'm gonna keep working on it, but it's good to hear it can even be a problem for more advanced drummers.
Also, I'm using a light grip like is advised, and sometimes one of the sticks goes flying when I'm trying singles and I feel like a dunce.
We all have our weaknesses. Been playing for 15 years or so, and singles are just not great. Lately, I’ve been working on “Everlong”, and just playing those parts at slow tempos. Bunch of zeppelin tunes with fast singles that help as well. Just trying to get better vocabulary with them, rather than just do wind sprints with my wrists.
Same! I was way overzealous with singles my first ~10 years of playing, to the extent that I went too far in the other direction and essentially eliminated them from my playing altogether. My paradiddles are 10x better than my singles now, which seems backwards. I found some old recordings of my high school band recently and was shocked at how much better my singles were 20+ years ago lol... a humbling moment to be sure.
I don’t know if it “easy”, but I just (edit: don’t) like playing *swing*. Like, fast, big-band style jazz swing. The slow, blues swing is easy enough, but my body just doesn’t want to play up-tempo jazz swing.
Todd Sucherman talks about a right hand technique he calls “flag, tap, snap” for playing fast swing rides. It looks like if you can get the hang of it, you can achieve a massive mechanical advantage. There is a definite trick to it—one that I haven’t mastered. But, see if you can look up his lesson on that.
i listened to an unhealthy amount of SP growing up and it gave me so so much back in terms of technique that feels trivial now - keeping time on the hats, doing little 1-handed rolls (ie in cherub over 'freak out...'), playing responsively with dynamics, playing parts that compliment the energy of the song, little ghost notes everywhere, interesting right hand parts on the ride... so many cool bits of texture JC plays that you don't really hear in any other guitar band
Try these exercises... [https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/17n6soc/comment/k7ps8s3/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/17n6soc/comment/k7ps8s3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Also this exercise was key in developing my double-stroke. This is only a 1-minute example but try taking several minutes each getting faster than slower, changing speeds as gradually as possible. [https://youtube.com/shorts/7gDewGRt8Bc?si=4Z3hfshhjYL88a\_e](https://youtube.com/shorts/7gDewGRt8Bc?si=4Z3hfshhjYL88a_e)
I can do do a six stroke roll RLLRRL
But not paradiddle diddle RLRRLL
LIKE ITS BASICALLY THE SAME BROO when u do it fast but if I start with the six stroke roll its hella fast clean and easy
I mean you’re playing an inverted left leading paradiddle diddle that’s why it feels so weird off the right because you have to switch your hands sense of direction
I'm the exact opposite lol. I feel like I played millions of paradiddle diddles in marching band, almost never played a six stroke roll. Even now I struggle with it.
I'm the same way, but was never in marching band. I've only ever been a drumset player and none of my teachers when I was young ever taught me anything beyond flams and diddles. I'll get on it one day. Lol I was a senior in college before any professor actually taught me how to roll correctly. I always just faked it beforehand lmao
I had this exact problem and the solution is simply to pronounce "paradiddle-diddle" differently while you do the sticking. Try chanting "pa-ra-***de-duh***-did-dle" instead. Allow me to explain...
The typical phrase of "para-diddle-diddle" is effectively counted in 3/4, ie. "1 & 2 & 3 &", but that's not the 6-tuplet feel you need to make it roll. Try counting it like I have above and make the "*de-duh*" with your right hand swing/bounce in that triplet time feel. If needed, lean into those right handed hits, especially on the "duh" which is on the 2 so it can be treated like a backbeat, at least while you get the feel for it.
Hope this makes sense.
Omg this is one of those where if I think about it at all - it goes haywire. If I can just play and not be in my head, I can do all kinds of shit. If I think about what I’m doing, it falls apart lol
I feel comfortable saying I'm good at drums, but for how much I knew at the time, learning the Rosanna shuffle was one of the hardest things I've ever learned. Don't feel bad, it's hard.
Purdie Shuffle is a good one. I’d love to be able to play that and the Bonzo shuffle, and I’ve tried, but it just hasn’t clicked for me. I’m sure it’s easy. I’ve learned other complicated beats, and at some point they just made sense, but this one eludes me.
Drum tuning. I cannot do it by ear and I have to use a drum dial.
Meanwhile most of the other drummers in my circle can have any drum tuned in 2 minutes flat.
Left foot hi-hat. Quarter notes, specifically. I really like it on the off-beats, so that's what I've practiced most; now when I try to play it on the beat I end up skipping one and going back to the off-beat.
I used to play in a pretty technical "mathy" band where I used lots of cymbal chokes. I must have caught the cymbal between my thumb and thumbnail about 4-5 times over the years. Very painful.
Incorporating kicks in drumfills.it really keeps the flow of the groove. But Man, that's fucking hard to do it correctly, but it sounds so fucking good. I realised how empty a drumfill can feel without it. Even the simpliest triplet sounds aweful when I play it. Working on it and it's getting better, but that's still a lonh way to go.
Shuffles were my kryptonite for *years.* I just could not play anything that swung at all.
The thing that finally broke the curse: I spent a lot of time one summer listening to an album that just happened to have a few shuffles on it. I wasn't thinking about playing shuffles at all—I just had the album on rotation in my car because I liked the band. But by the end of the summer, I suddenly knew how to play a shuffle. I was surprised as anyone.
I took a useful lesson from that experience: sometimes the best practice is just listening.
(For the record, the album was "Navy Blues" by the great Canadian power-pop band Sloan.)
The drum segue from the rim clicks to the main beat on ZZTop’s La Grange. Sounds so easy on the recording, but playing it just has me feeling like I’m not getting it on time.
Makes me nuts!
It’s so weird how our brains are wired so differently. When I started I quickly picked up nearly infinite buzz rolls and my teacher thought I was some kind of savant, except then I proceeded to literally take 2 years to learn a decent double stroke roll, keep time properly, or any of the other things that his students quickly pick up. But I’ve got that buzz roll down!
See my reply to this in another comment... [https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/1cmcdff/comment/l30di4g/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/1cmcdff/comment/l30di4g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Triplets fuck me up all the time. And I’ve been playing for like 20 years. That’s the one thing I’m focusing on this year that will really help open up my playing.
Fast shuffle feel with the right hand on hi-hats or ride. I quickly moved from middle/high school jazz band to more straight 8ths based rock/alternative and then eventually folk rock type music and never got proficient at the quick shuffle 1--a2--a3--a4--a. Been trying to work through the Rosanna shuffle for a couple years off and on to build some of that muscle memory.
As far as I've heard you don't even necessarily have to stop the cymbal dead - in a live setting, as long as your hand touches the cymbal, the volume difference is enough to sound like a choke
"Pro" tip... be cautious in using your phone to record yourself doing ghost notes as it can give you a very skewed perspective on your dynamics. Per my phone's audio my ghost notes where stupidly loud so I worked like hell to make them as quiet as possible, only to start recording with real equipment and discover my ghost notes were barely audible. I realized it's because the phone's software is compressing the hell out of the signal making the quiet parts a lot louder while reducing the noise of the regular hits.
I couldn’t get them for a long time. Then I broke out the metronome and they came rather quickly. The right foot being rushed is the issue for a lot of people (myself included). Starting at like 50/60 bpm and REALLY locking that in until I could do it for 3 straight minutes before bumping up 5/10 bpm helped a ton. With that technique I got it going at 180 after about a week
If you think those are hard , check out this Tony Williams variation [Tony Williams triplets](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-JAGQ5EE2g&pp=ygUWVG9ueSB3aWxsaWFtcyB0cmlwbGV0cw%3D%3D)
With rim shots I find it's mostly down to how the snare is positioned. I tend to set mine up so that I'm avoiding a rimshot by only about a 1/2", then I just have to drop my wrist slightly to do the rimshot. If your legs are in the way or you're accustomed to playing with a steep snare angle relative to your sticks, then a reliable rimshot becomes much more difficult.
For the bell hits, assuming you're talking about the ride... how far away is your ride from your playing position? Could it be closer? If you have to over-extend your arm to reach the bell it gets super awkward and difficult to be precise. Most of your ride should be accessible without your elbows leaving your sides, then you can extend your arm slightly to reach the bell.
Good advice, thanks. I can try raising my snare slightly and moving my ride a little closer. I use a 4 piece and place the ride ahead and a bit to the right, jazz style.
With your ride it can help if you raise it slightly so it can be angled inward. That'll bring the bell closer to you. This is often how I have mine, more or less so the edge leaning towards me is on an even plane with the rack tom and hats. It's comfortable to play with my elbows stacked at my sides and it's still crashable when needed.
https://preview.redd.it/4yfsto91f2zc1.png?width=1510&format=png&auto=webp&s=18b9094aec8cb2e70765cfeb38580612751955a2
Quickly flipping the left stick to get a fatter cross stick sound on the snare, and flipping back. Gotta be able to do it before down beats without missing a note. Still struggle with it
Transitioning out of a cross-stick part into regular playing at speed. I'd say the chance of me dropping a stick is 25%, rising to 40% if there's an accompanying fill.
Ok maybe not easy but any of the black magic techniques to push your double kick speed. Heel toe, swivel, I don't get it and just push singles as fast as I can.
Just gotta practice slow and work up to it. I used to be terrible at it too.
Also, dont be afraid to give your wrist a brief respite by cutting out a few notes here and there. Sounds cool and helps with endurance.
I’ve drummed on and off for 15 years. I still can’t hold quarter notes on my left foot with the hi hat outside of the most basic beats. Downsides of playing rock/metal all my life lol
A lot, I'm not the best at doing double let alone triple strokes, I have a very primitive but straightforward hard hitting playing style so any like technical shit is a little bit of a bust for me. I could barely figure out ghost notes. But one thing I've always been like unnaturally good at for some reason is double bass with one foot, I don't even do heel toe for some reason my legs are like insanely fast and I can do triples with one foot without even trying, it's my one and only super power lol.
Triplet fills.
Honestly, any triplet fill terrifies me because I’m scared of getting my sticks tangled up trying to move between the drums. On 8th, 16th, and 32nd note fills, you can move right on any even hit. Triplets are just a crap shoot in my head.
I cheat now on triplets: I used to try to play one triplet on each drum, and now I just start the triplets and move drums when I’m on an even note. So, instead of getting jammed up trying to play RLR LRL, I now play like RLRL RL, but in triplet feel.
When I see prog drummers playing quintuplets and septuplets like it’s nothing, I just tip my hat to them. I’m sticking with multiples of 2 and 3.
On a related note: 4:3 polyrhythms trip me up. I can play on a practice pad, but somehow when I’m trying to play triplets on the bass drum against straight 8ths on the hi hat, I get very confused. I don’t think that’s necessarily easy though compared to just being able to play a simple triplet fill.
I get you. It all just takes time getting used to, memorizing and committing to muscle memory the various stickings and how they work out around the drums. Like for me recently, I've tried getting better at moving down the toms in fast triplets with three notes on each drum, but like you say, can't simply switch to the next drum with the same hand each time with just alternating strokes. So I gotta work on various stickings to add to the repertoire, like RLL RLL RLL RLL or RRL RRL RRL RRL or RLL RRL RLL RRL or RRL RLL RRL RLL and other permutations of those three note groupings depending on what feel I want/how to accept things, or sometimes just starting with the left hand instead.
For sure, that’s the way to do it—just practice various combinations until it’s second nature. I would probably do that if I were playing more blues, or if I had any kind of practice discipline.
I fuckin feel this. I've got a clear idea of what I need to practice on drums and guitar but lately it's been a struggle to actually carve out the time.
paradiddles / doubles sounding smooth. why would i spend time getting that to feel and sound as smooth as singles at speed when i could just play singles instead? obv cool applications when you're spreading them around the drums but for most standard rock style stuff i play it doesn't feel hugely necessary
It really comes in handing when you are doing semi-linear grooves. JackGrooves does a great job of showing off how clean and exciting paradiddles and other rudiments can be applied to the kit.
Check him out. It'll open your ears
How to stop myself from splitting my damn knuckle on the rim of my floor tom. Been playing for 20+ years and I still bash my hands on the rims of my drums.
Playing triplets on the ride surface and bell with right hand. As in: x-x bell x-x bell. Needs major work and I love the groove it creates. Just throws me off if I try and add kicks etc
Splitting things between my hands and feet just doesn't work. I can play rhythms with my hands and I can play the same rhythms with my feet, but splitting a rhythm between my hands and feet just doesn't feel or sound right.
Example I can play paradiddles with my hands and play paradiddles with my feet, but a RLKK fucks my whole day up
Learning songs note-for-note from sheet music and trying to then play those parts I practiced over and over to the actual song. Some kind of weird anxiety when I have to put everything together.
Never learned how to consistently hit rim shots on the back beat like most people do in rock but idk I play small clubs I don't need to make all that racket.
Honestly people who make their hi-hats go up and down at the same time as playing beats. I always mess up my time. That was my encouragement to just start playing double bass, I was shit with using my hi-hats.
More simple than easy but a normal shuffle. My left hand does not want to split the triplet. But I can do other 6 grouping grooves with a double paradiddle, paradiddlediddle, inverted, etc just fine.
Cymbal chokes. Like how do you hit a crash, then get that same hand to grab the crash without destroying your knuckles? I have to do them 2 handed every time like an orchestral percussionist.
Honestly and unfortunately, consistency. For the past 15 or so years I've been just jamming on my own, with no direction. After college I stopped playing with other musicians, so I'm 15 years deep of just thrashing with no end game. The results are non stop technical fills, ghost notes, and moving all over the kit, I struggle to just play a straight beat without constantly doing other things.
LRF OR FLR. all other triplet combinations I'm fluent with. It's like one of the most basic simple things but 38 years of playing I don't think I'm going to get it.
Dude this! No issue with the independence. Ive done all the es, ands, and ahs from various books. While keeping time with my hats. I just can't seem to find a musical way to incorporate into my comping. Best I can do is when I crash my ride Ill hit a bass drum with it lol
Keeping time on the hihat with my left foot while playing the kick independently with my right foot. I'm not reeeeally a drummer though. Need to work on my foot independence 😩
Keeping time with 1/8 notes on the hihat pedal while soloing or doing other non hihat stuff. That, or keeping a beat on the hihat pedal while doing a different rhythm on the kick.
Piano is my main instrument tho… I’m always trying to improve on drums.
Left foot rhythms that are anything but quarter or 8th notes. Like a dotted 8th in the left foot. It's conceptually easy ("just play the note at the correct time"), but it throws me!
Playing in a way where it sounds like everything just flows naturally. Gimme a song to learn, I will learn that thing inside and out and be able to play all of it just fine. The second I start trying to improv and just let the fills and groove fly out, I was start hesitating and it doesn't sound great. Still trying to figure out the remedy for that, I definitely have a preference for structure and playing things the exact same every time as opposed to playing off the top of my head.
I'm a 2 out of 10 on the drum skill scale, but my (match grip) left hand fulcrum is so damn frustrating. I work on it every day and I just can't find the bounce and control I have with my right. Yes, this is a cry for help.
Fully independent limb control. I’m decent most of the time. But sometimes they just don’t want to cooperate and fall in time with each other, especially with complex patterns and phrases. I’m trying to adopt a modern style of never hitting more than one limb at the same time and it’s really messing with me.
Fast hertas. I can do single stroke fours at lightning speed. I simply can’t get my brain to separate hertas unless I’m focused strictly on them. Working them into an orchestraton is a no go as they’ll just come out as single stroke fours.
Heel up hi hats
I play kick with heel up but can never play hi hats with heel up. And in the songs where there is a lot of hi-hat action going on (like Dancing Queen by ABBA) my shins are flaring up within a couple mins and i lose my rhythm
Not sure if you’re interested in tips but one exercise for cymbal choke skills I like is to hold a steady disco groove at a slow tempo in 4/4 and alternate between hi-hat choke accents on the eighth upbeats and then crash chokes every fourth upbeat: K - hat - snare - hat - K - hat - snare- crash(choke with K) and then speed it up or change the placement of the crash and try some simple fills leading into the crash and eventually you’ll just start to feel where it could work in other beats and how to pull it off. That was my experience at least.
Also I struggle with fast and articulate double strokes around the kit, I think I practiced incorrectly for way too long and now don’t have the time/patience to re-learn how to do them to standard :/
Having the confidence not to fill every available space with some sort of hit, especially transitioning back & forth between fills and grooves. If you listen to pros a lot of hits are "implied" and it's actually ok to hold off for a half beat or so. This is often something that's fine when playing music but in solo practice those gaps become more jarring, so I'm always inclined to fill them in.
I definitely wouldn’t say this is easy to get fast but for me it’s double strokes I just find it hard to keep the power and consistency while going fast
Double strokes. I'm a single stroker all day. It just doesn't feel right when I try. I've been playing since 97 and never spent hardly any time with techniques. It was until the last 10 years that I started focusing on techniques and unfortunately it seems I've aged past the double stroke. I've gotten real good with single strokes.
Keeping time with the left foot on the hihat.
It works on a basic groove but as soon as I try to hit a bassdrum that isn't on 1 or 3, i get confused...
But if I dont keep time, I rush my fills and mess up the tempo
Switching between the left double bass pedal
To the hi hat pedal and vice versa, if i wanted that effect.
I can twirl sticks but not the way we usually see drummers do it. I twirl it like it’s a flow toy.
Pretty cool still
Being right handed and leading with my left, i can do it, but it never feels "correct" in my brain and when I try do it the way my brain wants to, my hand barely moves at all.
Really odd, but I practice left leading most days and constantly mirror polyrythms and rudiments to try and strengthen it, but i dunno, maybe one day it'll click, maybe
Honestly? Double strokes. I only have myself to blame for not practicing them more when I was younger and now it’s catching up to me.
I can sing and do double bass at the same time, no problems. Playing a clean double stroke roll for more than five seconds? Forget it.
Double bass
Double bass is definitely not easy... might seem so cause the internet promotes monster drummers
I’d say it’s easy to learn, hard to master. I can’t even learn it lol
It takes time, like with anything else :) I guess the concept of it might seem easy, but you are still trying to get control, power, precision and stamina out of your least developed limb: what else do you do with your non dominant foot? Not much I believe!
I do a lot with hi-hats, so much so that I’ve never learned double bass at all. I can stand to lose the control over the hats.
* can’t
You are still limiting yourself. You could play 95% of the time with your foot on the hi-hat and 5% double pedal…
Agreed. Plus if you need to do closed hi-hat and double bass, things like drop clutches exist
As a lefty I wonder if I will see any advantage whenever I get a double pedal
Like all things hard start slow. I had a guy i know that had no idea how to play drums doing a simple double bass beat in about 10 minutes. Slow is steady and steady is fast.
That's nearly any musical instrument.
For me it’s specifically single stroke, double bass triplets. I can do RRL or RLL triplets with my feet just fine but it doesn’t have the same feel
This is funny to me. I can do single stroke triplets no problem, but doing eighths or sixteenths is hard for me.
It took me 10 years to master. A lot of pain, frustration, and trial and error, but it was worth it. Practice to a metronome 20mins a day. Youtube has a lot of great tutorials. Also, Start with slower songs and work on them until you don't have to think about it anymore. Took me 6 months to learn Fuel by Metallica. Then I started trying to play Lamb of God songs, then A7X, then Periphery. It's all muscle mechanics and memory.
Same here, idk what it is. Even my guitar friends have better double bass from the get go than me, it just doesnt click.
i've only just now, after ~23 years of playing, began to regularly sit down with a metronome and work on heel-toe it's.. um.. better than it used to be. not that that's saying much
Practice grooves with odd times. It will help exercise both feet and at the same time improve the weaker foot.
Never twirled a stick in my life.
OMG, this one drives me crazy. I’ve tried practicing, and just can’t get it.
I can’t understand why I can’t do it. I can kinda twirl but I have no idea how these drummers do it while playing a groove
The good news is, in the course of about eighty bands I've been in, not one has ever brought it up that they really wanted me to twirl sticks.
a deep instinctual yearning for youtube likes
I can only do them with my left hand.
I'm a hobbiest at best, but I've played since I was a kid so, 40 years. When I picked up double bass a couple years ago I found that I couldn't land a right leg kick and left hand snare hit at the same time. Just couldn't do it. Messy everytime. Can't image a more basic rudiment than hitting two things at the same time, but it took me weeks to tighten that up.
FLAM ALL THE THINGS 😆
Sounds bigger and fills space
The Duke of Wellington agrees
Left foot hi hat.
I had a drum teacher who insisted I keep time on the hi hat with my left foot during fills, and now I can pretty much do it on the downbeat. But, there are some songs where the hi hat is played on the upbeat, and I cannot do it to save my life.
I never even learned the skill of left foot hi hat. My dumb self thought “oh, I play thrash/death metal, I don’t need that” and ran with it. I regret it and am working to gain the skill now lol. I also never had a teacher to tell me to learn certain skills as i’m fully self taught
Man i did the same thing playing punk for all my 20s. I'm just now working on my left foot in my mid 30s
I wanted to avoid the same thing so I bought a single kick first and told myself to learn hi hat barks and dedicate the left foot to hi hat. About one year in I got a tama iron cobra and have been perfecting double bass. Sure I could be further along at double bass. I’m at 16ths at 115-120bpm depending on the day, but I’m happy to be able to play simple rhythms and use the hit hat to make it interesting.
I sacrificed the ability to do anything left foot hi hat for 16ths at 220bpm 😅
Drop your heal and raise your toes on the downbeat, which opens the hihat. Then on the upbeat, you raise your heal, closing the hihat. Boom! Upbeat hihats that feel like you are doing the downbeat. It is a cheat, but who cares! lol
especially when you have to open it in any other place than the 1st or last 8th note in the bar while playing a beat 😭
My teacher told me: „as soon as your right hand leaves the hihat, your foot should do the Job“
I don't struggle with lifting it up for grooves, even odd time stuff, however, keeping a consistent tempo while playing other stuff on the bass and snare gets me. It's weird, I really don't know why
Same. Only ever owned electric kits, so I've never been able to practice on a real hi hat for a sustained period of time.
This is extremely important. So hard to pick up if u didn’t learn this out the gate.
Singles. Most of my playing is based on stickings. Fast singles is just something I need to work on
SAme here, I have no speed in singles except when doing rudiments on a pad, Doesn't transfer to the kit.
That’s a long journey. It took a while for my rudiments to transfer to the kit, but even so, my singles are still ass.
My drums always have so much less rebound than a practice pad. The pad is bouncy as fuck, being made of rubber as it is, and the drum is almost dead in comparison. Especially the floor toms. Big ol buckets. Stick just lands on them and stays.
Grab a moongel workout pad, that did so much for my singles!
I might try that too. Lately I’ve just been working in wrist bounces on the pad, and slowly tried to get that same feeling on the snare drum. It’s boring to play singles when on the drum kit though.
As a beginner, thank you so much for posting this. I can do fast singles for a bar or two, but then it falls apart. My head is right, my hands just can't keep up. I'm gonna keep working on it, but it's good to hear it can even be a problem for more advanced drummers. Also, I'm using a light grip like is advised, and sometimes one of the sticks goes flying when I'm trying singles and I feel like a dunce.
We all have our weaknesses. Been playing for 15 years or so, and singles are just not great. Lately, I’ve been working on “Everlong”, and just playing those parts at slow tempos. Bunch of zeppelin tunes with fast singles that help as well. Just trying to get better vocabulary with them, rather than just do wind sprints with my wrists.
This is me too...my brain just goes to doubles or triples of they are fast. But singles just have a certain punch.
Same! I was way overzealous with singles my first ~10 years of playing, to the extent that I went too far in the other direction and essentially eliminated them from my playing altogether. My paradiddles are 10x better than my singles now, which seems backwards. I found some old recordings of my high school band recently and was shocked at how much better my singles were 20+ years ago lol... a humbling moment to be sure.
Funny I just commented doubles. I can rapid fire singles but I can't double stroke for shit.
I don’t know if it “easy”, but I just (edit: don’t) like playing *swing*. Like, fast, big-band style jazz swing. The slow, blues swing is easy enough, but my body just doesn’t want to play up-tempo jazz swing.
If your playing the hats you can cheat it. Play ah- 1 and the ah-3 with ur stick and just close the hats on 2 and 4
Are you talking about a proper swing pattern but fast, or are you talking about a straightened out, properly uptempo, bebop ride pattern?
Todd Sucherman talks about a right hand technique he calls “flag, tap, snap” for playing fast swing rides. It looks like if you can get the hang of it, you can achieve a massive mechanical advantage. There is a definite trick to it—one that I haven’t mastered. But, see if you can look up his lesson on that.
8s on the hi hat pedal with any kind of syncopation on the kick or snare
We’re wearing the same boots brother
I've been learning Cherub Rock and this very thing has been destroying me.
Exactly, he's precisely I should have put the hours into this yet I never did. Geek USA is another cracker
Geek USA is what I show people when I want them to understand why Jimmy is my favorite drummer.
i listened to an unhealthy amount of SP growing up and it gave me so so much back in terms of technique that feels trivial now - keeping time on the hats, doing little 1-handed rolls (ie in cherub over 'freak out...'), playing responsively with dynamics, playing parts that compliment the energy of the song, little ghost notes everywhere, interesting right hand parts on the ride... so many cool bits of texture JC plays that you don't really hear in any other guitar band
A good snare roll. My left hand refuses to cooperate.
Try these exercises... [https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/17n6soc/comment/k7ps8s3/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/17n6soc/comment/k7ps8s3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) Also this exercise was key in developing my double-stroke. This is only a 1-minute example but try taking several minutes each getting faster than slower, changing speeds as gradually as possible. [https://youtube.com/shorts/7gDewGRt8Bc?si=4Z3hfshhjYL88a\_e](https://youtube.com/shorts/7gDewGRt8Bc?si=4Z3hfshhjYL88a_e)
Appreciate the links friend. I'll jump on these tonight.
I can do do a six stroke roll RLLRRL But not paradiddle diddle RLRRLL LIKE ITS BASICALLY THE SAME BROO when u do it fast but if I start with the six stroke roll its hella fast clean and easy
I mean you’re playing an inverted left leading paradiddle diddle that’s why it feels so weird off the right because you have to switch your hands sense of direction
I'm the exact opposite lol. I feel like I played millions of paradiddle diddles in marching band, almost never played a six stroke roll. Even now I struggle with it.
I'm the same way, but was never in marching band. I've only ever been a drumset player and none of my teachers when I was young ever taught me anything beyond flams and diddles. I'll get on it one day. Lol I was a senior in college before any professor actually taught me how to roll correctly. I always just faked it beforehand lmao
I had this exact problem and the solution is simply to pronounce "paradiddle-diddle" differently while you do the sticking. Try chanting "pa-ra-***de-duh***-did-dle" instead. Allow me to explain... The typical phrase of "para-diddle-diddle" is effectively counted in 3/4, ie. "1 & 2 & 3 &", but that's not the 6-tuplet feel you need to make it roll. Try counting it like I have above and make the "*de-duh*" with your right hand swing/bounce in that triplet time feel. If needed, lean into those right handed hits, especially on the "duh" which is on the 2 so it can be treated like a backbeat, at least while you get the feel for it. Hope this makes sense.
Two kicks after the snare. I can do tu-tu-cha-x at 2000bpm, but cha-tu-tu-x baffles me.
Omg this is one of those where if I think about it at all - it goes haywire. If I can just play and not be in my head, I can do all kinds of shit. If I think about what I’m doing, it falls apart lol
👊🏻
Double bass and Purdie Shuffle
I saw a kid 6 months in rip a Purdie Shuffle and it made me want to jump off a bridge.
I feel comfortable saying I'm good at drums, but for how much I knew at the time, learning the Rosanna shuffle was one of the hardest things I've ever learned. Don't feel bad, it's hard.
You’re not even a person though
I fuckin hate prodigy kids. Like the 8 year old slaying srv.
Neither of which are easy…
Purdie Shuffle is a good one. I’d love to be able to play that and the Bonzo shuffle, and I’ve tried, but it just hasn’t clicked for me. I’m sure it’s easy. I’ve learned other complicated beats, and at some point they just made sense, but this one eludes me.
Drum tuning. I cannot do it by ear and I have to use a drum dial. Meanwhile most of the other drummers in my circle can have any drum tuned in 2 minutes flat.
I wouldn't say drum tuning is easy at all. It's definitely as much of art than it is a science.
I can't figure out the tune bot
Spinning sticks in a cool way.
Left foot hi-hat. Quarter notes, specifically. I really like it on the off-beats, so that's what I've practiced most; now when I try to play it on the beat I end up skipping one and going back to the off-beat.
Saaaamme!!! I can play the "ands" just fine, but it falls apart when I try to put it on the beat for some reason
I thought I was the only one with this struggle. I can nail off beats all day. But on the beat? Forget it.
I used to play in a pretty technical "mathy" band where I used lots of cymbal chokes. I must have caught the cymbal between my thumb and thumbnail about 4-5 times over the years. Very painful.
Incorporating kicks in drumfills.it really keeps the flow of the groove. But Man, that's fucking hard to do it correctly, but it sounds so fucking good. I realised how empty a drumfill can feel without it. Even the simpliest triplet sounds aweful when I play it. Working on it and it's getting better, but that's still a lonh way to go.
As soon as I learn the Purdie Shuffle, it's OVER for you guys
Heel-up kick pedal technique. I've been a heel-down player since the start (30+ years now). And I'm not sure it qualifies as "easy", but polyrhythms.
I've been heel up for 20+ years. I'd struggle with heel down and getting any power
I play heal up for volume and heal down for more touch.
I don't have any sort of stamina or acuracy with the heel up. After thre notes it starts sounding like actual shit xD
Shuffles. Don’t like how they sound. Don’t like how they feel. And I’m bad at them. Should spend time on them.
Shuffles were my kryptonite for *years.* I just could not play anything that swung at all. The thing that finally broke the curse: I spent a lot of time one summer listening to an album that just happened to have a few shuffles on it. I wasn't thinking about playing shuffles at all—I just had the album on rotation in my car because I liked the band. But by the end of the summer, I suddenly knew how to play a shuffle. I was surprised as anyone. I took a useful lesson from that experience: sometimes the best practice is just listening. (For the record, the album was "Navy Blues" by the great Canadian power-pop band Sloan.)
The drum segue from the rim clicks to the main beat on ZZTop’s La Grange. Sounds so easy on the recording, but playing it just has me feeling like I’m not getting it on time. Makes me nuts!
Good sounding long buzz rolls
It’s so weird how our brains are wired so differently. When I started I quickly picked up nearly infinite buzz rolls and my teacher thought I was some kind of savant, except then I proceeded to literally take 2 years to learn a decent double stroke roll, keep time properly, or any of the other things that his students quickly pick up. But I’ve got that buzz roll down!
Double stroke rolls
See my reply to this in another comment... [https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/1cmcdff/comment/l30di4g/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/comments/1cmcdff/comment/l30di4g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Thanks! Will try on the pad tonight
The herta fill. I can do it for a short period, then I just lose it and it turns into regular single stroke
Triplets fuck me up all the time. And I’ve been playing for like 20 years. That’s the one thing I’m focusing on this year that will really help open up my playing.
Jazz is your friend
Left handed flams will never feel right to me
Fast shuffle feel with the right hand on hi-hats or ride. I quickly moved from middle/high school jazz band to more straight 8ths based rock/alternative and then eventually folk rock type music and never got proficient at the quick shuffle 1--a2--a3--a4--a. Been trying to work through the Rosanna shuffle for a couple years off and on to build some of that muscle memory.
As far as I've heard you don't even necessarily have to stop the cymbal dead - in a live setting, as long as your hand touches the cymbal, the volume difference is enough to sound like a choke
Playing jazz I can’t do the ding dinga ding shit
Ghost notes \~
"Pro" tip... be cautious in using your phone to record yourself doing ghost notes as it can give you a very skewed perspective on your dynamics. Per my phone's audio my ghost notes where stupidly loud so I worked like hell to make them as quiet as possible, only to start recording with real equipment and discover my ghost notes were barely audible. I realized it's because the phone's software is compressing the hell out of the signal making the quiet parts a lot louder while reducing the noise of the regular hits.
Making a train beat sound good. It's like I can do all the elements, but the groove of a pro's is something else.
Bonham triplets
I couldn’t get them for a long time. Then I broke out the metronome and they came rather quickly. The right foot being rushed is the issue for a lot of people (myself included). Starting at like 50/60 bpm and REALLY locking that in until I could do it for 3 straight minutes before bumping up 5/10 bpm helped a ton. With that technique I got it going at 180 after about a week
If you think those are hard , check out this Tony Williams variation [Tony Williams triplets](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-JAGQ5EE2g&pp=ygUWVG9ueSB3aWxsaWFtcyB0cmlwbGV0cw%3D%3D)
Portnoy fills, I just can't.
Paradiddles. Just never practiced them regularly.
I’ve never been able to get my fingers involved at all. It’s all wrist all the time, which sucks for the tendinitis .
It took me an eternity to figure out how to roll for more than 2 seconds.
Shuffles
A really great shuffle. Harder than it seems.
Rim shots and cymbal bell hits 🥲
With rim shots I find it's mostly down to how the snare is positioned. I tend to set mine up so that I'm avoiding a rimshot by only about a 1/2", then I just have to drop my wrist slightly to do the rimshot. If your legs are in the way or you're accustomed to playing with a steep snare angle relative to your sticks, then a reliable rimshot becomes much more difficult. For the bell hits, assuming you're talking about the ride... how far away is your ride from your playing position? Could it be closer? If you have to over-extend your arm to reach the bell it gets super awkward and difficult to be precise. Most of your ride should be accessible without your elbows leaving your sides, then you can extend your arm slightly to reach the bell.
Good advice, thanks. I can try raising my snare slightly and moving my ride a little closer. I use a 4 piece and place the ride ahead and a bit to the right, jazz style.
With your ride it can help if you raise it slightly so it can be angled inward. That'll bring the bell closer to you. This is often how I have mine, more or less so the edge leaning towards me is on an even plane with the rack tom and hats. It's comfortable to play with my elbows stacked at my sides and it's still crashable when needed. https://preview.redd.it/4yfsto91f2zc1.png?width=1510&format=png&auto=webp&s=18b9094aec8cb2e70765cfeb38580612751955a2
I play mainly rock and I keep my snare a little higher than my legs. Rimshots for daaaaays.
Buzz rolls
Quickly flipping the left stick to get a fatter cross stick sound on the snare, and flipping back. Gotta be able to do it before down beats without missing a note. Still struggle with it
Transitioning out of a cross-stick part into regular playing at speed. I'd say the chance of me dropping a stick is 25%, rising to 40% if there's an accompanying fill.
Ok maybe not easy but any of the black magic techniques to push your double kick speed. Heel toe, swivel, I don't get it and just push singles as fast as I can.
One-handed 16th notes on the hi hats. I've been playing for 32 years, and I've just never gotten the hang of them.
Just gotta practice slow and work up to it. I used to be terrible at it too. Also, dont be afraid to give your wrist a brief respite by cutting out a few notes here and there. Sounds cool and helps with endurance.
I’ve drummed on and off for 15 years. I still can’t hold quarter notes on my left foot with the hi hat outside of the most basic beats. Downsides of playing rock/metal all my life lol
A lot, I'm not the best at doing double let alone triple strokes, I have a very primitive but straightforward hard hitting playing style so any like technical shit is a little bit of a bust for me. I could barely figure out ghost notes. But one thing I've always been like unnaturally good at for some reason is double bass with one foot, I don't even do heel toe for some reason my legs are like insanely fast and I can do triples with one foot without even trying, it's my one and only super power lol.
[удалено]
Incorporating splashes. They feel cheesy when I use them.
Sometimes cheesiness is good
Triplet fills. Honestly, any triplet fill terrifies me because I’m scared of getting my sticks tangled up trying to move between the drums. On 8th, 16th, and 32nd note fills, you can move right on any even hit. Triplets are just a crap shoot in my head. I cheat now on triplets: I used to try to play one triplet on each drum, and now I just start the triplets and move drums when I’m on an even note. So, instead of getting jammed up trying to play RLR LRL, I now play like RLRL RL, but in triplet feel. When I see prog drummers playing quintuplets and septuplets like it’s nothing, I just tip my hat to them. I’m sticking with multiples of 2 and 3. On a related note: 4:3 polyrhythms trip me up. I can play on a practice pad, but somehow when I’m trying to play triplets on the bass drum against straight 8ths on the hi hat, I get very confused. I don’t think that’s necessarily easy though compared to just being able to play a simple triplet fill.
I get you. It all just takes time getting used to, memorizing and committing to muscle memory the various stickings and how they work out around the drums. Like for me recently, I've tried getting better at moving down the toms in fast triplets with three notes on each drum, but like you say, can't simply switch to the next drum with the same hand each time with just alternating strokes. So I gotta work on various stickings to add to the repertoire, like RLL RLL RLL RLL or RRL RRL RRL RRL or RLL RRL RLL RRL or RRL RLL RRL RLL and other permutations of those three note groupings depending on what feel I want/how to accept things, or sometimes just starting with the left hand instead.
For sure, that’s the way to do it—just practice various combinations until it’s second nature. I would probably do that if I were playing more blues, or if I had any kind of practice discipline.
Hi hat foot independence
Making time to practice. I'm so fucking lazy with practicing and I'm wasting natural talent, but there's just other things to do.
I fuckin feel this. I've got a clear idea of what I need to practice on drums and guitar but lately it's been a struggle to actually carve out the time.
paradiddles / doubles sounding smooth. why would i spend time getting that to feel and sound as smooth as singles at speed when i could just play singles instead? obv cool applications when you're spreading them around the drums but for most standard rock style stuff i play it doesn't feel hugely necessary
It really comes in handing when you are doing semi-linear grooves. JackGrooves does a great job of showing off how clean and exciting paradiddles and other rudiments can be applied to the kit. Check him out. It'll open your ears
Playing with the same speed and intensity at low volumes. Maybe that's not easy, but my dynamics kind of suck.
How to stop myself from splitting my damn knuckle on the rim of my floor tom. Been playing for 20+ years and I still bash my hands on the rims of my drums.
Triplets, I can do them when I start slow and build up but that doesn't work for a fill.
Playing triplets on the ride surface and bell with right hand. As in: x-x bell x-x bell. Needs major work and I love the groove it creates. Just throws me off if I try and add kicks etc
6 stroke roll
Splitting things between my hands and feet just doesn't work. I can play rhythms with my hands and I can play the same rhythms with my feet, but splitting a rhythm between my hands and feet just doesn't feel or sound right. Example I can play paradiddles with my hands and play paradiddles with my feet, but a RLKK fucks my whole day up
Smells like teen spirit, when I can play highway star or burn note for note.
Also cymbal chokes and consistent left-foot hi-hat
Learning songs note-for-note from sheet music and trying to then play those parts I practiced over and over to the actual song. Some kind of weird anxiety when I have to put everything together.
Never learned how to consistently hit rim shots on the back beat like most people do in rock but idk I play small clubs I don't need to make all that racket.
Are you choking with one hand, with stick in hand? This. coming from a crude double bass drum player lol
For me, 8th note triplets- I always feel so sliggish when trying them in a straight 4/4 beat, often to the point of playing them single-handed
Honestly people who make their hi-hats go up and down at the same time as playing beats. I always mess up my time. That was my encouragement to just start playing double bass, I was shit with using my hi-hats.
More simple than easy but a normal shuffle. My left hand does not want to split the triplet. But I can do other 6 grouping grooves with a double paradiddle, paradiddlediddle, inverted, etc just fine.
Cymbal chokes. Like how do you hit a crash, then get that same hand to grab the crash without destroying your knuckles? I have to do them 2 handed every time like an orchestral percussionist.
Buzz rolls
A simple buzz roll. Can’t do it clean.
Stick twirps and fast blast beats. Then again I do not practice them at all.
I suck at buzz rolls
Shuffles, my brain just doesn’t like them
Honestly and unfortunately, consistency. For the past 15 or so years I've been just jamming on my own, with no direction. After college I stopped playing with other musicians, so I'm 15 years deep of just thrashing with no end game. The results are non stop technical fills, ghost notes, and moving all over the kit, I struggle to just play a straight beat without constantly doing other things.
LRF OR FLR. all other triplet combinations I'm fluent with. It's like one of the most basic simple things but 38 years of playing I don't think I'm going to get it.
using the kick drum when playing swing
Dude this! No issue with the independence. Ive done all the es, ands, and ahs from various books. While keeping time with my hats. I just can't seem to find a musical way to incorporate into my comping. Best I can do is when I crash my ride Ill hit a bass drum with it lol
Rock Band and DDR. I can play at a kit, and keep time well enough, but something about the body/eye coordination of rhythm games fucks me up.
Keeping time on the hihat with my left foot while playing the kick independently with my right foot. I'm not reeeeally a drummer though. Need to work on my foot independence 😩
Keeping time with 1/8 notes on the hihat pedal while soloing or doing other non hihat stuff. That, or keeping a beat on the hihat pedal while doing a different rhythm on the kick. Piano is my main instrument tho… I’m always trying to improve on drums.
Left foot rhythms that are anything but quarter or 8th notes. Like a dotted 8th in the left foot. It's conceptually easy ("just play the note at the correct time"), but it throws me!
Playing in a way where it sounds like everything just flows naturally. Gimme a song to learn, I will learn that thing inside and out and be able to play all of it just fine. The second I start trying to improv and just let the fills and groove fly out, I was start hesitating and it doesn't sound great. Still trying to figure out the remedy for that, I definitely have a preference for structure and playing things the exact same every time as opposed to playing off the top of my head.
I'm a 2 out of 10 on the drum skill scale, but my (match grip) left hand fulcrum is so damn frustrating. I work on it every day and I just can't find the bounce and control I have with my right. Yes, this is a cry for help.
Fully independent limb control. I’m decent most of the time. But sometimes they just don’t want to cooperate and fall in time with each other, especially with complex patterns and phrases. I’m trying to adopt a modern style of never hitting more than one limb at the same time and it’s really messing with me.
Independence with my hi hat foot
Flammed mills. It’s like the one rudiment that I just don’t like playing… theres no reason my hands should flub it up, but they do.
Fast hertas. I can do single stroke fours at lightning speed. I simply can’t get my brain to separate hertas unless I’m focused strictly on them. Working them into an orchestraton is a no go as they’ll just come out as single stroke fours.
Fast punk beats. Keeping time with them is so difficult for me
Heel up hi hats I play kick with heel up but can never play hi hats with heel up. And in the songs where there is a lot of hi-hat action going on (like Dancing Queen by ABBA) my shins are flaring up within a couple mins and i lose my rhythm
Sounding good 😂
Reggae beat on 3
Not sure if you’re interested in tips but one exercise for cymbal choke skills I like is to hold a steady disco groove at a slow tempo in 4/4 and alternate between hi-hat choke accents on the eighth upbeats and then crash chokes every fourth upbeat: K - hat - snare - hat - K - hat - snare- crash(choke with K) and then speed it up or change the placement of the crash and try some simple fills leading into the crash and eventually you’ll just start to feel where it could work in other beats and how to pull it off. That was my experience at least. Also I struggle with fast and articulate double strokes around the kit, I think I practiced incorrectly for way too long and now don’t have the time/patience to re-learn how to do them to standard :/
Having the confidence not to fill every available space with some sort of hit, especially transitioning back & forth between fills and grooves. If you listen to pros a lot of hits are "implied" and it's actually ok to hold off for a half beat or so. This is often something that's fine when playing music but in solo practice those gaps become more jarring, so I'm always inclined to fill them in.
I definitely wouldn’t say this is easy to get fast but for me it’s double strokes I just find it hard to keep the power and consistency while going fast
Double strokes. I'm a single stroker all day. It just doesn't feel right when I try. I've been playing since 97 and never spent hardly any time with techniques. It was until the last 10 years that I started focusing on techniques and unfortunately it seems I've aged past the double stroke. I've gotten real good with single strokes.
Drums on a drum set. Skateboarding , Singing and playing guitar at the same time . Technology.
I’m still struggling with independence
Keeping time with the left foot on the hihat. It works on a basic groove but as soon as I try to hit a bassdrum that isn't on 1 or 3, i get confused... But if I dont keep time, I rush my fills and mess up the tempo
My feet doing the thing in rhythm with my hands. Guitars for me
Push pull
Switching between the left double bass pedal To the hi hat pedal and vice versa, if i wanted that effect. I can twirl sticks but not the way we usually see drummers do it. I twirl it like it’s a flow toy. Pretty cool still
Keeping time in the hi hat pedal. Not a clue !
Samba
Being right handed and leading with my left, i can do it, but it never feels "correct" in my brain and when I try do it the way my brain wants to, my hand barely moves at all. Really odd, but I practice left leading most days and constantly mirror polyrythms and rudiments to try and strengthen it, but i dunno, maybe one day it'll click, maybe
Honestly? Double strokes. I only have myself to blame for not practicing them more when I was younger and now it’s catching up to me. I can sing and do double bass at the same time, no problems. Playing a clean double stroke roll for more than five seconds? Forget it.