An oldie, but a goodie, this quick little tip can come in handy.

I found this exercise when digging around for my tax papers! A metronome is required. Start at a slow tempo and play straight through. Once you get comfortable, try it a various tempos, but not continually faster, trying mixing up the tempos. Experiment with setting the metronome as quarter, eighths, half, and whole notes.

brad frank drums great timing exercise

The idea is to feel the juxtaposition of the various subdivisions. When you get comfortable playing any subdivision (locking in with the metronome) you will be able to better feel when you are rushing or dragging once the metronome is not  on. For example, if you can feel septuplets (dividing the beat into 7 parts) versus sextuplets (6 parts) you’ll be able to develop a sense of when you are rushing or dragging the subdivision because sextuplets will feel like quintuplets (5 notes per beat) or septuplets. Getting comfortable with this exercise really helped me to feel steady with my timekeeping when I didn’t have a metronome to rely on.

You can play alternating sticking starting with the right or left hand. Also try playing it with double strokes. Download the PDF: Rhythm-Timing Exercise

Below are my four videos demonstrating various ways to interpret  the snare drum rudiment The Drag.  I was inspired by Steve Gadd’s interpretation of the Ratamacue in his video Up Close. You should definitely have that one in your video collection. Steve stretched out the rhythm and replaced a snare note with his bass drum. The result was a new idea to play around the drum kit that sounded much hipper than your average military style Ratamacue. I thought why don’t I do my own interpretations with other rudiments? So I did! Hopefully this will inspire you to develop your own licks based on the Drag.

Click here for a printable set of exercises based on these video lessons.

Part 1 is a demo song showing all of my Drag interpretation in a song context.

Part 2 demonstrates the basic drag with 16th note and triplet orchestrations.

Part 3 shows advanced rhythmic and linear applications of the Drag. Click here for a PDF transcription: The Drag Part 3 Examples

Part 4 displays my double bass (kick) drum interpretation of the previous Drag-inspired rhythms from Part 2. Click here for a PDF transcription: The Drag Part 4 Examples

Hello to those of you who checked out my Youtube drum tutorials. The videos are still works in progress. I’m posting them on Youtube to see how they look, but I have not finished writing out all the transcriptions. I’m currently recording Part 4 (double bass drum interpretations of The Drag) . I will get the video and the transcriptions posted ASAP, but for now you can click on this link for a PDF transcription of Part 3 of my drum tutorial: The Drag Part 3 Examples