This exercise is something I love, accented double stroke. Now I don’t double with accents like a group of five-stroke rolls. I mean everything is doubles and you have to accent the doubles (if you look at the manuscript below it’ll make a bit more sense!)
Now this exercise requires us to really stretch our double stroke facility. Because we have accented and non-accented doubles, I feel it best to approach it as you would single strokes with accents. This means we need our accented notes to all be one stick-height and our taps to be all one height. This must be practiced in front of a mirror, checking our heights, our technique and also listening so we’re creating a great sound.
Keep your grip loose and really pay attention to your technique. I’m a big believer in not jumping from wristing your doubles to drop grab too soon. A larger muscle group will produce a bigger, fatter sound but make sure you’re loose, as we don’t want any injures to creep in. We need to make sure our underlying double grace notes are clean and of a correct low stick-height yet still sound full. At slow tempos this isn’t a problem, but as we increase the tempo I suggest focusing on them, making sure they’re still sounding good. When we get the speed up we’ll need to drop these double grace notes even lower to accommodate our lower accent heights which will add to the challenge of this exercise.
I hope you enjoy this (the video will explain a lot).
Will Taylor is an author, educator and session musician based in London, UK. Find him online at willtaylordrums.co.uk.
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