I've been working on a lot of hand/foot combinations lately, but it's mostly been various two-plus-two or paradiddle variations. Tapping idly while waiting for my coffee to finish brewing, it dawned on me that three-plus-one might be a little more interesting. Three strokes, whether with your hand or your foot, require a lot more control than simply a bounce-rebound.

So here's the deal: Keep quarter notes on either the ride cymbal or the hihat, depending on which hand is free. Then cycle through the following patterns, typically four or eight bars of each before moving on.

HFFF HFFF HFFF HFFF
FHFF FHFF FHFF FHFF
FFHF FFHF FFHF FFHF
FFFH FFFH FFFH FFFH

Then switch your hands and feet for eight variations, total. As with all of these sorts of things, you want to work through every combination of right hand/right foot, right hand/left foot, left hand/right foot and left hand/left foot. That seems like a lot, but it goes by quickly.

I'm going to try this one out tonight and report back in the "drumming diary."

This won't be an explicit exercise, but just something cool you might want to try, that I'm totally stealing from a local drummer I saw last night.

Basically, it's an augmentation of playing a sidestick on the snare in a groove, that makes it sound almost like hands clapping. The context was acid jazz, and it seems like it would be really useful in that style of music or in hip-hop.

Start with a bit of a funk feel, playing sixteenth notes with your right hand on the hi-hat, but with an eighth note "pulse." Sidestick on the snare on two and four. Bass drum can do whatever you want, but if you want it to sound kind of like The Roots, the sparser, the better.

Now, on two and four, bring your right hand over and hit the snare, taking care not to hit your hand or the other stick. With your left hand muffling it, the combination of the sidestick and the snare tap results in a much more textured sound. It may take some time to get used to moving your right hand back and forth between the hi-hat and snare, but with practice, you can make your funk sound a little fatter, and fatter funk is fine with me.

Okay, I just stumbled across another good progressive accent warmup. I'm constantly looking for single-hand accent patterns, typically with multiple accents in a row, because the whole physiological aspect of, say, hitting two accents followed by two normal strokes seems vastly different than alternating between accented and unaccented strokes.

Anyway, to that end, try this on for size:

RrRR rrRR Rrrr RRRR rrrr RRRr rrRR rrRr

and then the same thing with the left. You could probably alternate one rep with the right and one with the left. I had picked this up as an exercise for alternating strokes from a Tommy Igoe clinic, but I suspect it'll work well for the accents as well.