Grab your free transcription of the exercises in this video (it will be emailed to you).
It’s often the case that when we seek to understand an abstract concept, we see lots of differing opinions among “experts”. Plenty of great drummers have good double stroke rolls, so why is it that opinions vary so widely on how to teach/learn them?
That could extend to videos in which the presenter has some unorthodox learning method. Like me in the thumbnail for this week’s video. “What are the odds that all the great drummers throughout history, from Papa Jo to Tony Williams to modern greats all did this thing, and this one random guy is going to come up with something new or novel in the approach. I guess they were all wrong?”
Such is the question in my head whenever I seek to deconstruct a physical movement.
To start with, those great drummers weren’t wrong. If you can do it, there’s not much more to say. The issue comes with communication.
Imagine there’s a feeling of double strokes being right. We don’t have telepathy or Neurolink, so I can’t connect a cable from my brain to your brain to incept you with the feeling. So I have to do the next best thing: use words, and visuals.
Double strokes, and hand technique in general is especially difficult, because the movements are small, and they’re often hidden from view, inside the hand. (As opposed to, say, a golf swing.) So visuals only get you so far.
In my opinion, much of drum instruction tackles this problem by getting the student “in the territory” of correctness, then assuming if they just add reps, they’ll eventually get it.
In that paradigm, this video is just an attempt to geolocate that neighborhood more precisely. i.e. with this method, you’ll need hopefully less time to get the feeling for yourself.
We do that by focussing on the hardest part of the double stroke - what’s actually happening in the bounced double - and slowing it down, to almost infinity. In that region, the drop-catch mechanics that tons of great drummers do without thinking, but which Gordy Knudtson pointed out most effectively, are our key.
If we can increase the time between the first and the second double to infinity, we solve the most pernicious problems of double strokes: the evenness between strokes without forcing it, and the “dead zone” between articulating and bouncing.
Come with me on the journey;)