Have you been writing the same drum parts over and over again? Are you looking for some new patterns to add to your arsenal?

You’re in luck: the answer to your problem was right under your nose this entire time.

Resource: The 40 Drum Rudiments

In this quick video lesson, Dorothea Taylor shares five less-popular rudiments that you can use to build into your drum parts.

Dorothea has decades of experience teaching and playing marching snare. These rudiments deserve more love, and they may be just what you need to upgrade your drum fills (and beats and solos), whether you keep them on the snare drum or move them down the toms:

1. Single Ratamacue

The single ratamacue pattern sounds like ‘ra-ta-ma-CUE’, with an accent at the end. Make sure you get a nice clean drag on those grace notes.

2. Swiss Army Triplets

Flam-right-left. That’s the Swiss Army Triplet!

3. Double Drag Tap

It’s in the name: two drags and a tap. Double Drag Tap.

4. Drag Paradiddle #1

Drag Paradiddle #1 starts with a single stroke. Then a drag takes you into the paradiddle.

5. Grandma’s

This hybrid rudiment (meaning it’s not found on the list of 40 standard rudiments) consists of a paradiddle with an accent on the second note, followed by an accented tap.

Remember to practice all of these slowly and regularly until you have them clean and tight.

We’ve put together a playlist with drumless tracks at different tempos so you can practice your exercises over real music:

Dorothea has a ton of rudiment-focused lessons (and more) in the Drumeo members area. Get a free trial here!

Short answer: no! But let us explain…

Dorothea Taylor – godmother of drumming and queen of drumline rudiments – has seen a lot of drummers during her almost 60 years of playing. So we asked her to break down some key scenes from the movie Drumline (2002).

When it came out. it reminded the general public that hey – drummers are pretty awesome. School drumlines have since gotten better and better, and more people have felt inspired to pick up the sticks.

Dorothea notices something while she’s watching Nick Cannon’s scenes in Drumline.

“Did he really play that? Or was the camera just showing hands?”

Dorothea’s gut was right: Cannon was not the one with all the drumline chops in the movie. In the first film, the blazing hands belonged to a guy named Jason Price (a Florida A&M drummer who later played with the Atlanta Hawks drumline, the Atlanta Falcons drumline and more).

Blasphemy? Not so much – it’s tough to find an amazing drummer who’s also an amazing actor. It’s common for actors to have a skilled stunt double or body double.

But Cannon did train with Price for a month to learn how to play the snare drum and how to master some of the stick tricks. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough time to pick up the level of chops he would’ve needed to convincingly do it all himself.

Nick Cannon now has a daytime talk show, and he invited Dorothea to join him for a drum battle! You can watch that clip in the reaction video at the top of this page.

And in that video, Marcus Joyner (a ‘hand double’ for two main characters in the second Drumline movie) calls in to chat with Dorothea while she goes through scenes from the film. She also drops facts about actual drumlines and if she thinks the movie reflects reality.

Dorothea was a snare drummer in her school drum and bugle corps, and she’s been mentoring and teaching drumline drummers (and drum set drummers) ever since. She’s also a Drumeo coach and rudiment advocate who’s always pushing outside the box.

If you like reading about drumlines, check out this interview with the Percussion Director of the Baltimore Marching Ravens.

Dorothea Taylor isn’t just the godmother of drumming…she’s also the queen of rudiments. Did you know that these popular drumming patterns make up the bulk of a lot of the grooves, chops, and fills you hear on your favorite albums or in your favorite drum videos?

Paradiddles are Dorothea’s go-to because they’re so versatile. There are four ways to play a paradiddle (we call them ‘inversions’):

1. RLRR LRLL (watch this video to learn how to play the standard paradiddle)
2. RLLR LRRL (inversion 1)
3. RRLR LLRL (inversion 2)
4. RLRL LRLR (inversion 3)

Think of it like shifting the RLRR pattern down a circular conveyor belt until it comes back out the end you started on!

Once you get used to playing paradiddles and inverted paradiddles on a single surface, try them in a groove on the drum kit and break the rights and lefts between snare and hi-hat, snare and toms, or other surfaces. Add ghost notes and dynamics to give the groove more feel.

If you didn’t think there were even more ways to do cool things with paradiddles, well…there are.

You can play each inversion (variation) four different ways by putting the accent on a different beat. Try to only accent the 1s, then only accent the 2s, then the 3s, then the 4s.

For example, here’s how you’d shift the accents on a regular paradiddle:

1. Rlrr Lrll
2. rLrr lRll
3. rlRr lrLl
4. rlrR lrlL

Four paradiddle variations, and four variations on each of those: that’s 16 ways to play a paradiddle!

Once you learn these paradiddle variations well enough to play them in your sleep, you’ll find yourself using them all the time. You may not realize you’re playing rudiments when you’re sprinkling these concepts into your beats and fills, but they’ll take your stick control and creativity to the next level.

We’ve put together a playlist with drumless tracks at different tempos so you can practice your exercises over real music:

If you enjoyed this video, you can learn much more from Dorothea so you can play faster and tighter – with a Drumeo membership!

Dorothea Taylor (the godmother of drumming)’s version of blink-182’s classic track “What’s My Age Again” is the perfect bird-flip for anyone who thinks you need to be a fresh-faced 20 year old to be a drummer.

One reason why this song is perfect for Dorothea is how Travis Barker uses rudiments in the intro (Dorothea is the rudiment queen). Barker was a marching drummer in school and it’s cool how he incorporated that training into his drum parts. Flams, five stroke rolls, pataflaflas…who would’ve thought you’d ever hear these in punk rock drumming?

“You’re never too old or too young to start playing drums,” says Dorothea. As a testament to this, she’s officially challenging Travis Barker to a drum battle. Think we can make it happen?

(P.S. If you catch someone judging too many books by their cover, share these videos with them)

I felt this spirit that I was going to be a drummer, even though women and girls did not play drums back then. By 8th grade, I decided that I didn’t care if anyone was going to think crazy of me or tease me. I just knew that I was a drummer at heart.

In the drum and bugle corps, when you got good enough, you could seed up to the regular corps for competitions. I joined when school started in September, and by December I was drumming with kids who’d already been there for a year.

My mom would get me up in the morning. If it was 20 below, I still had to walk to school. I’d get my clothes on, come downstairs, and if my mom was still fixing me breakfast I’d go into the dining room where I had a practice pad. I would play some singles or doubles or paradiddles, even if it was five minutes’ worth. Mom would say “hurry up” and “eat your breakfast” and I’d walk to school.

We didn’t have a cafeteria, so I would walk almost a mile back home, go straight to the practice pad, play a bit, eat lunch, brush my teeth, and run back to school. Then I would come home at 3:30, go back to the practice pad and stay there for a good amount of time.

I would do some homework and eat dinner, and then it was back to the pad.

If you added up all of this, I was practicing for over two hours a day. I loved it from the very beginning. I loved seeing the progress, seeing my paradiddles get smoother and cleaner, and I would be anxious to go back and learn another rudiment for the next week. I kept adding to my knowledge and I just got good.

One day, some judges came in and asked us to play while they listened from another room. They couldn’t see your technique or anything, but they could hear you building up double stroke rolls, paradiddles, ratamacues.

I had only been in the corps for three months, but when they came out of that room, it turns out I was at the top.

I took first place.

But because I didn’t have seniority, I ended up playing cymbals that whole first marching season. I was taken aback. I was disappointed because I knew that my hands were developed, I’d been practicing a lot, and I loved it so much. But I wanted to be there so much I went ahead and played for that summer.

By the next year, I’d already bumped up into the main corps. I think I played tenors the first year, and snare for the last four.

Me on first snare in 1968.

The drum and bugle corps would practice during the winter, two nights a week for like four hours at a time, and when summer came we practiced 8-10 hours a day. We practiced as sectionals and then we’d get together with the whole line and go through our marching routine at night. It wasn’t like signing up for drums at school and just playing in the classroom; it really built your chops.

If I had not done the drum corps, and talked my parents into getting me a drum set instead, I wouldn’t have had the skills with my hands – the chops, as they say – to be able to sit down and apply the fundamentals I had learned.

I didn’t get a drum set until the 11th grade – we couldn’t really afford it. My dad set up the drums for me in the living room. I started playing, and they said, “How did you know how to do that?” I had so much experience with my hands that I was able to go to town on the kit. Without that experience, it would have been totally different all these years.

My dad set up the drums for me in the living room. I started playing, and they said, “How did you know how to do that?”

I graduated high school at 17 and you could be in the corps until you were 21. But at 19 I fell in love. I wanted to stay and play, but my now husband was with the Air Force and got transferred to Myrtle Beach, so we decided to get married and that’s why I left.

In my years of teaching, I have not had to spend a lot of time showing every single student to hit the bass drum on 1 and 3, or whatever it may be, because of the training that I’ve given them with their rudiments and being able to switch fluidly from right to left. By the time they get rudiments down, and they’re a decent snare drummer or practice pad drummer, they don’t have that problem with fluidity.

To start someone from scratch on the drum set, their hands are not working, their wrists are stiff, they don’t know how to use the Moeller technique. They think it’s going to be easy. If you can’t play fast singles, doubles, or paradiddles, you won’t sound any good on the drum set. Look at Thomas Lang playing traditional grip – you can tell he has intense rudimental training. I can see it in his style.

If you’re new to drumming, get a practice pad and a pair of sticks and a copy of Stick Control. And when you can play all of those things at a pretty good tempo, then you can get on the drum set and work on some grooves.

I recently showed a student how to apply a paradiddle inversion on the kit. Their eyes opened up to a new world. They’re doing these things they think are boring on the practice pad, not realizing that they’ve got to get those tempos up, and to separate their hands between the ride and snare. They’re thinking oh, this book is so boring, but it’s not. I love the first page of Stick Control – it’ll get your wrist, fingers, and technique working, and you can expand it on the kit.

I know that many of you believe and agree that working out on a pad is extremely important in your progress in becoming a great drummer and maintaining your drum skills. I also believe that you don’t have to learn and perfect all 40 Essential Rudiments – along with the new hybrids – before you can sit down behind a drum kit. As a new student, you should be willing to learn the fundamentals and have fun doing it and be the best you can be.

You can’t expect to go to a drum set and play a Dave Weckl or Thomas Lang solo. You have to start on a pad with the fundamentals.

If someone went to a guitar teacher and said they’d never played guitar before but they wanted to learn a popular song, and their teacher went along with that, would they end up being a good player? They didn’t learn the strings, they didn’t learn where open C was, or a 1-4-5 progression. They just learned how to play that one song. You can’t be a professional basketball player doing fancy dunks if you’ve never had a basketball in your hand before. You can’t expect to go to a drum set and play a Dave Weckl or Thomas Lang solo. You have to start on a pad with the fundamentals.

It’s so important to learn these first. To climb the ladder of success, as they say, you’ve got to start at the bottom. You have to take it one step at a time. If you only know single paradiddles, singles and doubles and they’re pretty darn good, take the next step up and learn drag paradiddles, double and triple paradiddles, some linear patterns, and so on.

I think many people quit because they don’t get instant gratification. If you put in the work, you will see the results. Be patient, don’t put the cart before the horse, and soon you’ll be able to join Buddy Rich at the top of the ladder.

Dorothea Taylor

Dorothea Taylor has a series of daily warmups she’s used to train hundreds of drumline drummers, and now you can steal some of them for your own playbook.

When her drumline would go through these exercises together, the goal would be to have every tap sounding like one person and “not like a bunch of rocks falling”. Challenge a friend or two and run through these as a unit to see how cleanly you can play together.

Whether you’re a kit drummer or a marching drummer, these moves will get your blood circulating, your singles and doubles up to speed, and your brain ready for whatever’s next in your practice or session plan.

Grab a practice pad and play along!

1. 8 on a hand

Play 8 beats on each hand. That’s it. The main thing to keep in mind is getting that full rebound when you throw the stick down. Kick it off at a slow tempo, then bring it up to speed.

2. Double beat

A variation on an exercise called the ‘ha-ha’, this is a great doubles workout. You’ll be playing groups of two on each hand with the following sticking:
RR RR RR RR R R LL LL LL LL L L
RR RR R LL LL L
RR RR RR LL LL LL
RR LL RR LL RR LL RR LL
(Watch the video to see how it’s supposed to sound)

3. Hug-a-dig-a-burr

When you hear it, you’ll know why it has such a funny name. Another great exercise for doubles, you can alternate it with singles.

Dorothea wants you to make sure you’re holding your sticks properly, all fingers on the stick, and that you start slow. It takes time to learn and improve – and the patience is absolutely worth it.

If you’ve seen Dorothea Taylor on Instagram, you’ll know that she’s always practicing in the kitchen. So what better person to try ‘the egg challenge’?

Place a raw egg and a paper towel on the surface between two practice pads. Now play paradiddles where you go back and forth between one pad (par-), the egg (a-diddle), and the other pad (par-) before going back to the egg (a-diddle). See how long you can do it for – and don’t break the egg!

This exercise trains you to play your grace notes softly. And if the egg breaks, well…it’s time to make a scramble.

Did you try this challenge at home?

You might know Dorothea Taylor – the ‘godmother of drumming‘ and purveyor of excellent rudimental technique – from her popular Instagram page. She came to the Drumeo studio to demonstrate why paradiddles are so important, and how to practice them in a way that doesn’t make you want to jump out a window.

There are many different ways to practice paradiddles and push past the basic sticking. You can add accents and even string together a few variations over a play-along track, splitting the strokes between different drums and cymbals.

If you want to broaden your knowledge and improve your hand control, check out this lesson! And be sure to watch the end where Dorothea plays along to a song randomly chosen for her.

Lesson Index:
0:00 – SONG: “Tush” by ZZ Top
2:18 – Introduction
6:38 – Paradiddle permutations
12:25 – Adding accents
24:11 – How to develop doubles
28:10 – Paradiddle playalong
33:54 – SONG: “Purple Rain”

Download the PDF to practice along! And check out Drumeo for more lessons and courses from Dorothea.

We’ve put together a playlist with drumless tracks at different tempos so you can practice these exercises over real music:

Follow Dorothea:
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Have you ever found yourself making assumptions about someone before you’ve met them? What about before seeing them play drums? From assuming she plays ‘quieter’ instruments to not being taken seriously before an audition, Dorothea Taylor has heard it all when it comes to judging a book by its cover. She’s here to prove that you can’t always accurately assess a drummer – or anybody – by how they look. Check out Dorothea’s cover of “Down With The Sickness” by Disturbed!

Drummers come in all shapes, sizes, ages, and ethnicities. “No matter how good you are, how old you are, we’re all still part of a drumming family.”