So, let me talk a little bit more about the double stroke roll here.
What you will probably find is you can go pretty quickly this fast with your wrist [Demonstration. You’ll strain right here. So there is another technique that is often taught called the controlled bounce where you throw the stick down once and let it bounce the second time. This is something you might want to practice. [Demonstration]
As you see, my wrist is only moving once but I’m getting two strokes. So practice this one hand at a time until you’re comfortable. Then you might go change into this technique and go into it from your double strokes when you can go as fast as you can go with your wrist. So, it’d be something like this at first probably. [Demonstration]
And I purposely didn’t do it too smoothly because I want you to see where this happens. So you can go from your wrist technique and your controlled bounce technique, do it at the same speed of strokes so that it sounds as seamless as possible, then you can speed up. Since you’re really getting two strokes out of every one stroke of your wrist, you can all of a sudden go twice as fast.
Now, you might ask “Well, why didn’t you tell us this from the beginning and why don’t we always use it?” Well, it works pretty well on a tight drum, very tight drum, like a snare drum, and it might work well in some orchestral drumming, and it allows you to very quickly, once you learn this technique, go from very slow to very fast and back down. But in the long run on drum set, you don’t want to depend too much on the bounce. You want to have strong focused wrists. For instance, you can see on my leg I can play this fast with this wrist. There is no bounce on my leg, so you can see that eventually you do need to be that strong because a lot of the thumps are going to be tuned much more lax and you won't be able to depend on the bounce and the strokes typically with the controlled bounce, the second stroke does not sound as strong.
One last exercise with the double stroke roll—try practicing as you get better and better at it with an accent on the second stroke. An accent means to hit a little bit more loudly [Demonstration] and so forth. You’ll see that way you can really strengthen up your hands.
So, first practice it just with your wrist. Go as far as you can. Then try the controlled bounce where you throw down once and catch the stick after the second bounce. This will take a while to develop all by itself. And then you can incorporate that into your double stroke roll. Then try to get rid of this controlled bounce by just strengthening your wrist more and more. It’s not about huge World Wrestling Federation wrists; it’s about focusing the muscles inside there in your wrist to just do what needs to be done.
And that’s the double stroke roll.
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