Hi, I am Wes Crawford, and now we’re going to talk about the single stroke roll.

This is an exercise that every drummer on any kind of instrument around the world practices. And it’s what you probably have been doing before you’ve been playing drums on your school desk or at your dinner table with your knife and fork.

We just hit one hand at a time, back and forth, and when we do this, we’re going to go gradually from slow to fast to slow. Practice this so gradually that it drives everybody in your vicinity crazy. The reason you want to do this is you will get more out of it by practicing gradually. It takes you so long to go from slow to fast, hold it at your fastest for a while to build up your stamina, and then you really build up your stamina and control as you go from fast back down to slow because you’ve already been playing for so long.

Here is a demonstration, and I think you should actually do it more gradually than this. Again, I’m doing this just to demonstrate, slow to fast to slow, the single stroke roll, alternating right and left hands.

[Demonstration]

Notice that my strokes are about six inches high. Don’t try to do really big strokes right now. You’ll get the most control at the six to eight-inch height, and you’ll be able to do move around the drums more efficiently. Notice I stretched it out, slow to fast to slow, don’t cheat at the home stretch and end it too quickly.