So there I was, a couple of weeks ago, with a free night to practice but not much bandwidth to slog through a book. (I also didn’t want to hop on the kit that late and annoy my neighbors even more than I probably already do.) I figured I would get on the practice pad and work on my flam drag grid, which I’ve slacked off on for years. But after I couldn’t find any sheet music to meet my satisfaction, I naturally decided, what the hell — I’ll just do it myself.
If you don’t know, the 4–2‑1 grid is a classic drumline warmup/exercise involving moving something around (like an accent) on top of a sticking pattern (like a rudiment). Here’s the basic triplet singles grid, written in 12/8:
We call it 4–2‑1 because you play each accent variation 4 times, and then 2 (with one set of repeats), and then 1 time (with four repeats). You can do this with any lick, but triplet-based patterns seem to be the most common, perhaps because triplets naturally alternate hand-to-hand (so long as the underlying rudiment is hand-to-hand as well). 16th note-based stuff also just feels a bit clumsy.
I put together a little packet of triplet grids, using the most reasonable triplet rudiments:
- Singles
- Doubles
- Triples
- Tap Five Stroke Roll
- Flam Accent
- Flam Drag
- Single Drag Tap
Bonus — Hybrids!
- Herta (with the 16th notes as one “beat”)
- Chutichuh
- Cheese Accent
- Cheese Chuchudda
- Tap Flam Five
Grids with doubles and triples are a little unusual, but they still make for good practice. Some people like to go through the inversions as well, which is a little redundant, but I added them anyway since it wasn’t too much trouble to include them. (Although still a bit of trouble, since MuseScore does not let you copy and paste time signature changes. More on that in a couple of weeks…)
These are in the order they appear on the rudiment list, plus the hybrids, which are approximately arranged as they would be on the rudiment list. If the rudiment list were normal, it would end with flams rather than drags, which would give this packet a nice difficulty curve. Instead of that, and because I’m such an artiste, I grabbed some stock icons of flames and used them to grade the difficulty of each grid, from 0 to 5. (Don’t take them too seriously; I’d say there is a one-flame margin of error for each one.)
If I had to rank them myself, I would say:
- Singles
- Single Drag Tap
- Herta
- Triples
- Doubles
- Tap Five Stroke Roll
- Flam Accent
- Flam Drag
- Cheese Accent
- Chutichuh
- Cheese Chuchudda
- Tap Flam Five
I also added some annotations throughout when an accent variation creates a new lick, such as the “Chutudda” — a flam accent with the accent on the second note.
Well… I tried my best, as there is (unsurprisingly) a lack of clarity with some of these hybrids. For instance, some sources online say that the cheesecha has an accent on the last note, while others put the accent on the first note. Quite comically, some say the difference is based on how you write it (i.e., cheesecha vs cheese-cha). Similarly, some say that the chut-cheese has two accents on the first and second notes, while others only put an accent on the first note. Lovely, isn't it?
Once you get comfortable with these, you can try keeping the accent in the same spot while moving a flam around, or perhaps a drag/roll. Instead of inversions, you can keep an accent on different beats as you move the other stuff around. I guess you could also go through the inversion drills while keeping an accent in the same spot.
Maybe one day I’ll notate all that other stuff, but I haven’t worked out how many rudiments would actually be worth playing all those different ways, so let’s just start here.
There is/was a website selling grid books (which I remember deeply irritating the instructor of a drumline clinic I went to ages ago), but the store’s SSL certificate is gone, so I don’t know to what extent these guys are still doing business.
So for now… here ya go.
