Essential drum rudiments — making double strokes even

Here’s an important question from one of my customers in the UK.

I know what you mean about accenting the second note of doubles, but I would be careful thinking about it that way — it tends to lead to too much upward bending of the wrist and no proper use of rebound. That advice is meant to help with the issue of a fading second note causing unevenness.

The real secret to fast doubles is in the fingers and using rebound. The very fastest can only use passive finger control, which tends to sacrifice the second note a bit depending on the skill of the drummer.

A good strong active finger controlled double is what we will want in most situations — and the key to THAT is not using the fingers to drive the first note. Wrist or arm for the first note (arm is actually better, as the muscles used are different to the fingers) then fingers only for the second. Unfortunately it’s natural to want to use the fingers in both notes, but that is the challenge: to relax them for the first note and let the stroke rebound push the fingers away from the palm.

A great exercise for actually working on double stroke evenness is inverted doubles with the metronome. We need the metronome because otherwise it becomes too easy to simply fool ourselves and think of the first note as on the beat.

There is nothing PHYSICALLY different between doubles and inverted doubles — it is just our PERCEPTION of where the beat is. That is useful though, because our musical brain habitually emphasizes the notes on the beat.

Hope that is of some use to you…