Double Stroke 8ths With Feet

This lessons follows on from our Double Stroke Roll Sticking lesson. It will be much easier to follow if you are familiar with the content from that lesson. All exercises on this page should look very familiar as they are exactly the same as those used for the Single Stroke Roll lesson on a similar subject.

Adding feet under a snare exercise is a very useful thing to do as it will help develop foot technique at the same time as working on your hands. It will also improve independence and co ordination as well as your natural time keeping. In a practical sense we can add feet to fill patterns to both help keep time and to add an extra layer of sounds to the parts played.

Through this set of exercises you will be playing the rudiment as eighth notes and slowly building up the complexity of the feet patterns used underneath. All exercises will involve playing something with a foot at exactly the same time as playing something with a hand. It is hugely important that these notes are played exactly at the same time so I strongly recommend you work through the lessons in this Hand to Foot Syncronization Exercise.

In the first three exercises shown below you will be playing minims on the feet whilst the hands are playing eighth notes. These are nice slow and simple exercises to get you comfortable with the co ordination involved. In the set of exercises that follows the feet will be sped up. Remember, the hands will always be using the Double Stroke Roll sticking. A note has been given with each exercise to explain what is happening.

In the single stroke roll exercises I said 'any time a right hand hits, so will a foot'. That is not always the case with doubles. Pay attention to where the feet fall and make sure everything hits where it should.


Exercise 1

In this first exercise you play a right hand on the snare with a bass drum on beat 1 then again on beat 3, the rest of the bar is filled with a normal Double stroke roll:

Adding minim feet under quaver hands example 1


Exercise 2

The second exercise is the same only the bass drum is substituted for a left foot on the hi hat:

Adding minim feet under quaver hands example 2


Exercise 3

And finally you will play a right foot on beat 1 and a left foot on beat 3:

Adding minim feet under quaver hands example 3


TASKS

  1. Using the 2 minute rule, get all exercises up to a tempo of at least 130bpm.
  2. Take two of the exercises above and turn them into a 2 bar long repeated pattern.

In the following exercises the hands are still played as quavers but the feet are played as crotchets.


Exercise 1

In this first exercise you play a right hand on the snare with a bass drum on beat 1 but on beat 2 you hit a left hand and snare, this pattern repeats for beats 3 and 4:

Adding crotchet feet under quaver hands example 1


Exercise 2

The second exercise is the same only the bass drum is substituted for a left foot on the hi hat:

Adding crotchet feet under quaver hands example 2


Exercise 3

In this exercise you will play alternating bass drums and hi hats with the feet:

Adding crotchet feet under quaver hands example 3


Exercise 4

And finally, the same as the previous exercise but starting with a hi hat:

Adding crotchet feet under quaver hands example 4


TASKS

  1. Using the 2 minute rule, get all 4 exercises up to a tempo of at least 130bpm.
  2. Take two of the exercises above and turn them into a 2 bar long repeated pattern.

Lessons

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