Sometimes when drumming we want to get from one part of a kit to another but doing so will involve crossing your arms. This is to be avoided at all costs as it can cause the hands to knock into each other and throw off your playing. The paradiddle gives us a way of switching our sticking around to allow us to make odd movements, such as from the floor tom to a snare, much easier. I say a Paraiddle, we're actually only going to use half a Paradiddle.
Written below is an example of a fill that could cause some problems with crossing over arms. Notice that from beat 3 to beat 4 we are moving from a floor tom to a snare drum.
If this were to be played with a single stroke sticking you would hit the floor tom with the left hand on the 'a' count of beat 3 followed by a right hand on the snare for beat 4. Try this now. Notice how the left hand gets right in the way! If you switch the sticking of beat 3 to the first half of a paradiddle it will flow much better. The fill is shown again below with the new sticking added in:
You only need to use the Paradiddle sticking from beat 3. Beats 1 and 2 work fine as a single stroke so there is no need to make things more complicated for yourself.
Let's quickly look at another example.
In the fill shown below moving from beats 2 to 3 could cause an issue.
You are playing two sixteenth note floor toms followed by two sixteenth note snares. As above, playing these as singles will require crossing of the arms which is risky. Double strokes could be an option but then there is a straight roll around the kit on beats 3 and 4 so doubles can't really be used without causing the same arm crossing problem. My sollution here would be to play a full paradiddle over beats 2 and 3, which is a bit of an odd placement as you would normally expect to start a sticking pattern at the start of a bar but it will make the fill 'flow' without any risk of clashing arms. The fill is shown again below with my suggested sticking added. The phrase marking above the bar shows where the paradiddle falls.
It is quite rare that you will need to use this technique as there are other more preferable options available that we will cover later on. It can however be very useful to know.
