Total Drummer

WITHOUT RUDIMENTS you are missing the fundamental building blocks of drumming.

Whether you like it or not we all need rudiments. As a drummer you cannot escape them. If students that are adamant that they don't won't to get involved with 'proper' learning of the drums, they must still understand that they will inevitably use rudiments every time they sit at the drums.

Take a very basic snare roll that Travis Barker plays at high speeds in a Blink 182 song. Any drummer that wants to learn that has to learn to coordinate their hands to play right, left, right, left evenly at speed. Well that particular sticking pattern is a single stroke roll. And that is a drum rudiment!

And therefore the faster and smoother they can play a single stroke roll snare drum rudiment, the faster and smoother they can apply that to fast punk songs around the drum kit and rock out in their band.

And that's the thing, spending time on these very structured exercises gives us the technical facility to be free on the drum kit to play whatever we want at a high standard.

Originally these were snare rudiments used in the military field. You can find more about that here. But as the drum kit evolved these snare drum rudiments became the fundamental patterns that we use on the drum kit as well.

So that's the rudiment lecture over, I think we can all agree that they are necessary for every drummer.