Single Stroke 8ths With Feet

This lessons follows on from our Single Stroke Roll Sticking lesson. It will be much easier to follow if you are familiar with the content from that lesson.

Now you have the hands sorted out let's try adding feet into the exercise. This is a very useful thing to do as it will help develop foot technique at the same time as working on your hands. It will also improve independence and co ordination as well as your natural time keeping. In a practical sense we can add feet to fill patterns to both help keep time and to add an extra layer of sounds to the parts played.

Through this set of exercises you will be playing the rudiment as eighth notes and slowly building up the complexity of the feet patterns used underneath. All exercises will involve playing something with a foot at exactly the same time as playing something with a hand. It is hugely important that these notes are played exactly at the same time so I strongly recommend you work through the lessons in this Hand to Foot Syncronization Exercise.

Only three parts of the kit will be used. The snare, which was shown in the previous lesson. The bass drum, which is notated in the very bottom gap of the stave, and the hi hat played with the left foot, which is written as an 'x' underneath the stave.

In the first three exercises shown below you will be playing minims on the feet whilst the hands are playing eighth notes. These are nice slow and simple exercises to get you comfortable with the co ordination involved. In the set of exercises that follows the feet will be sped up. Remember, the hands will always be using the Single Stroke Roll sticking. A note has been given with each exercise to explain what is happening.

Exercise 1

In this first exercise you play a right hand on the snare with a bass drum on beat 1 then again on beat 3, the rest of the bar is filled with a normal single stroke roll:

Exercise 2

The second exercise is the same only the bass drum is substituted for a left foot on the hi hat:

Exercise 3

And finally you will play a right foot on beat 1 and a left foot on beat 3:

TASK

1. Using the 2 minute rule, get all exercises up to a tempo of 120bpm with good hand technique.
2. Play all 3 exercises as a continuous 3 bar pattern, then repeat.

Next you will be upping the note value the feet are played at. Rather than minims, you will now be using crotchets. The hands will remain at 8th notes. This just means that on every numbered count, a foot will be played. As before, a note has been included to explain what is going on with each exercise.

Exercise 1

In this first exercise you play a right hand on the snare with a bass drum on beat 1 then again on beats 2 3 and 4, the rest of the bar is filled with left hands playing the snare. So the rule for these exercises is any time a right hand is played, a foot plays with it.

Exercise 2

The second exercise is the same only the bass drum is substituted for a left foot on the hi hat:

Exercise 3

In this exercise you will play alternating bass drums and hi hats with the feet:

Exercise 4

And finally, the same as the previous exercise but starting with a hi hat:

TASK

1. Using the 2 minute rule, get all 4 exercises up to a tempo of 140bpm.
2. Take two of the exercises above and turn them into a 2 bar long repeated pattern.