Hi! I am Wes Crawford, and now we’re going to explore three-stroke patterns.
So far, we’ve learned about the single strokes which you have two hands, and that’s an even-numbered pattern of events. We have the double strokes, obviously an even-numbered pattern of events. We have all the paradiddles. They each have an even number of strokes in them so they’re all even. But we’ve neglected odd note groupings. The smallest odd number that you can create a pattern out of is three. So we’re going to call this category three-stroke patterns. Since we’ve been combining single and double strokes, we’ll combine them now into three-note patterns.
So, the first one would be one stroke with hand and two with the other. We have right-left-left, right-left-left, right-left-left, right-left-left and so forth. Then, we want to also do it in a more balanced fashion so we’ll start with the left and do one left and two rights, left-right-right, left-right-right, left-right-right, left-right-right.
I’m sure you can now see that these little packets of coordination combining singles and doubles could be very handy with a lot of numbers of things, but let’s now try to add the feet in on the first stroke. So, let’s do the right-left-left with the feet on the first stroke and now I’ll put my right hand over on the right cymbal.
[Demonstration]
Well, just by simply doing that, we created an acceptable waltz. A waltz is something in three. It’s a piece of music in three and we count one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. For what it’s worth, this simple little exercise all of a sudden created a useful beat.
Let’s now put my right hand back on the tom just so you can hear better and we’ll go left-right-right with the feet playing together on the first stroke, left-right-right. [Demonstration] When you get very, very comfortable with that, let’s try the other permutations or let’s change the order that we’re doing those three strokes.
Let’s think in terms of the single stroke. With the single left stroke pattern, we we’re just doing left-right-right, left-right-right. But now let’s put it in the middle of that three-stroke pattern, so it goes right-left-right-right, left-right-right. We’ll put the feet on the very first stroke of the pattern and you get right-left-right-right, left-right-right. So, you can see the value in this. It’s a whole different character when you change the order of the strokes.
Let’s now reverse it and go with the single right hand stroke in the middle of these three notes, so it’ll be left-right-left, left-right-left. Smoothly, left-right-left, left-right-left.
Here we go, feet together on the first stroke. [Demonstration] Let’s put the single stroke at the end, so we’ll start with right-right-left, right-right-left. We’ll put these feet together on the first stroke, we get [Demonstration]. And then we’ll do the opposite, left-left-right with the feet together on the first stroke.
[Demonstration]
So again, we’re building up the coordination for these little kernels or packets of coordination between the hands and the feet.
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