paradiddle advice

[erictheweary]

As a non drummer trying to help my son with his drumming is driving me crazy! He is supposed to be learning paradiddles but when he or i do them they don't sound like anything. We've got the basic stick pattern and as I understand it they should be evenly played 16th notes? At the tempo we have got it up to still doesn't sound like a proper fill.

For example, we have tried working with a metronome to practice keeping things to time. If we play so that each beat on the metronome is matched by one drum stroke then we get to around 200bpm, but that's really only doing a paradiddle at 12.5 bpm?
Surely there must be a way to speed up?

any tips?

[Grunfeld.]

Surely there must be a way to speed up?

any tips?

Fellow non-drummer here but my son is having lessons and what his tutor emphasises again and again is correct grip and a variety of exercises on the pad, e.g. like really little movements, and at some point you get a sort of double strike thing going and the speed just takes off.

To my very untutored eye it's like he gets two hits for the price of one.

Might be worth taking your son along for a few lessons cos I'm not sure it's the sort of thing that's easily worked out on your own.

[smokingbeagle]

Priceless for advice on rudiments:

http://www.vicfirth.com/education/rudiments.html

If you're in the Black Country I've heard very good things about the drum tutors' down the back of TR Music in Walsall; there's also Charles Laird in Warwick who's superb. A lesson or three to at least get the basics down would be money well spent IMO.

[thereformant]

To a certain extent i think focusing on the moller technique early (the double stroke thing your talking about) isnt really that productive. Its more fun to learn how to actually play stuff. A paraddidle on its own isnt going to sound any more like a fill than a single stroke roll, and in fact if your playing it perfectly it should be indistinguishable.

The purpose of a paraddidle is to swap the leading hand so that you can move around the kit easier, for example by single stroke rolling round the toms then paradiddling on the floor tom to allow a return to the snare drum.

[erictheweary]

he has lessons via the school so I have to interpret stuff to some extent after. Interesting for me and may even help my rythmn guitar playing ( or may not...). I may also have to retract all those drummer jokes I made over the years ( well, may have to...).

I couldn't get why a paradiddle was any different from just doing single or double strokes ( or even just hitting a drum with a single stick fast enough). ie it doesn't have its own sound to it. My son was playing it something like 'quarter note, quarter note, eighth note, eighth note, quarter note, quarter note, eighth note, eighth note' which gave it its own feel but after looking it up in his book I realised it was straight 16th's and he was doing it wrong. The bit about being able to change hands makes sense. At the moment if he does any kind of roll round the drums he ends up at the floor tom and has to miss a beat to get back on the snare/hi hat.

the vicfirth site wont work properly here but I'll check it out later - looks really usefull.

I have now seen an ad for drumfest in Birmingham in July. I really enjoyed guitarfest in 2007 so I might take him to drumfest - wether it will inspire him further or put him off altogether I'm not sure!