One of the biggest things I find myself complaining about is how drummers can’t seem to agree on what to call a lot of the stuff we play. Six-stroke roll, Bonham triplets, metric modulation… these terms could mean several different things depending on who’s using them and what the context is.

The worst casualty of this foible has got to be the ruff. Not many drummers in this day and age use the term ruff, and it seems like no one knows exactly what it’s supposed to mean.

I first heard of the ruff in the context of a “four-stroke ruff.” The four-stroke ruff and its related licks (e.g., three-stroke ruff, five-stroke ruff, and seven-stroke ruff) are basically short rolls, played as singles, typically ending with an accented note:

At least… that’s what I always thought. It seems simple enough, but that’s far from the case — I’ve seen as many as four other definitions for ruff across the ~400 years this term has been used by drummers, and these days a lot of it seems to come down to when a particular drummer learned the instrument and who they may have studied with.

So, to answer my question, we’re going to have to take a bit of a journey through drumming’s not especially well-documented history, and I’m going to try my best to summarize this debacle as concisely and concretely as I can.

Ruff is indeed a very old term, having been used as far back as the mid-1600s at least. Old textbooks, such as Thomas Fisher’s Warlike Directions (1643), mention drum licks such as the half ruffe and whole ruffe (in case you were wondering, “ruffe” was probably pronounced roof).

The Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon from 1688 (a massive encyclopedia-like text that explores thousands of things outside of drumming) discusses “Terms used by Drummers in their drum beating,” which includes “A Roofe. A Rowle. A right and left. A Flam. A Dragge. An Almon rowle. A Diddle, and Pou, Rou, tou, poung.”

Going off of this excerpt, the term drag may be as old as ruff, so even as far back as the late 1600s, drummers were using the words drag and ruff concurrently. But to help with our modern understanding of these words, which is which?

Unfortunately, these old books don’t have any notation or really any details on how to play these patterns. Nevertheless, drum historians have tried to decode the ruffe and have reasonably concluded that the whole ruffe is probably what we think of as a five-stroke roll, while the half ruffe is something resembling a single drag tap.

So, originally, ruffs involved playing open doubles. However, by the late 1700s, drag was now the term being used to describe patterns that may have previously been known as ruffs. For instance, The Young Drummer’s Assistant from 1780 doesn’t include any ruffs, but has what might be the first known instance of a notated “dragg”:

Ruff, on the other hand, began to refer to phrases similar to the drag, but played as singles. Benjamin Clark’s Drum Book from 1797 has the single and double drag as well as a single-stroke ruff on the final page, all on bottom line:

Charles Ashworth’s A New, Useful, and Complete System of Drum Beating (1812) presents four drag licks to the world:

Note the antiquated “half drag” and “full drag,” the latter being a spin on the single drag tap with slightly different sticking (that is, with the tap and the accent both on the same hand). It’s still possible in this day and age to hear alternating dragged quarter notes called half drags.

Also note “Slow, Say 123” and “Quick Like a Drag,” both of which are comparable to a ruff à la Clark. (ICYWW, the slashes through the stems are accents). That being said, the word “ruff” does not appear in the book at all.

A number of other texts from the early 1800s have the same story: patterns resembling the modern drag are included, while ruffs are either ignored or are described as single-stroke patterns. As the Ashworth book shows, different names existed for the single-stroke ruff, but drag has only ever meant something involving llR/rrL.

I can’t say what exactly led to this paradigm shift. The pattern llR is used across dozens of different drumming traditions around the world, so the drag and ruff may have been developed independently. Someone must have concluded that drags and ruffs are similar ideas, but drags involve doubles while ruffs involve singles. This is likely to be a historically inaccurate conclusion, but it’s tough to blame anyone given the circumstances.

This started to get messy in the mid-1800s, such as with Elias Howe’s United States Regulation Drum and Fife Instructor (1861), which uses ruff to describe llR:

Worse still, Howe did not rename other drag rudiments, so instead of something like a single ruff, we still have a single drag, et al.:

The conclusion from the above seems to be that llR is a ruff, while longer patterns that use ruffs are drags. Of course, this convention is not used elsewhere in our rudimental drumming canon — patterns with flams still have flam in the name. Also, note how, in the bottom right from above, there is a half drag, looking incredibly similar to the book’s concept of a ruff.

To add to the confusion, also note the “Ruff (Old Style)” and “Four Stroke Ruff” on the last system from above. We seem to have come full circle, with a new ruff being the original interpretation of the double-stroked ruffe, and the old ruff being the later single-stroke misinterpretation from the late 1700s. Of course, the story doesn’t end there, as the foreword of the Howe book also describes a “rough” as “four quick hard strokes,” played as singles. That’s four different ruffs, including the homophone.

Again, how this happened is a mystery. There is about a 30-year gap with surviving drum manuals from 1820–1850, so maybe the answer has been lost to time. Someone could have made a deliberate change, or it could have simply been a mistake.

For the next 50 years, we get a contradictory mishmash of different doctrines depending on the author. The Union Drum & Fife Book from 1862 has three (llR), four (lrlR), and five stroke ruffs (rrllR), as well as single and double drags, played as you’d expect. On the other hand, William Nevins’ Army Regulations for Drum, Fife, and Bugle (1864) only uses “drag” for llR patterns, while also including rlr ruffs and the similar “slow sag”:

Gardner Strube’s famous 1869 manual uses the same naming system as Howe, while True Drum Instructor from 1872 uses the Nevins approach. The Drummer’s and Fifer’s Guide from 1862 seems to revel in the nebulous difference between the ruff and the drag, as it puts the ruff and the half drag right next to each other, looking identical:

The only thing you could extrapolate is that the half drag is a particular kind of ruff phrasing. But considering how the authors don’t provide any concrete details in this regard, you would be justified in assuming that they are the same and that both were included just for thoroughness.

This book does have a single-stroke ruff: a three-note “tap ruff” (which ends with an accent, the first such ruff to explicitly do so). It’s worth mentioning that it also has the drag paradiddle, so by the late 1860s, nobody had yet used the term “ruff paradiddle” and so on.

However… did you notice that mordent mark above Strube’s ruff? Well, a big wrench comes in 1886 from none other than John Phillip Sousa, who has an open drag and ruff in his book The Trumpet and Drum:

“Open drag?” Ugh… this mess will never end, will it?

Let’s jump back to 1850 with The Drum-Major by T.D. Tamplini, the earliest book I know of that describes “open” and “close” drags:

I know what you might be thinking: What the hell is the difference? They look the same.

Well, the open drag uses quarters, while the close drag uses 8ths. Moreover, the grace notes in the open drag use 8th note beaming, while the close drag uses 16ths. For this to make any sense, we have to remember that, in a traditional rudimental context, open means slow, and close means fast. You can see it at the top of your rudiment sheet — “All rudiments should be practiced: open (slow) to close (fast) to open (slow) and/or at an even moderate march tempo.”

With Sousa, we now have the idea that a ruff is a close drag specifically. In modern drumming parlance, “closed” is contrasted with “open” to mean something is played buzzed, without discrete hits. But we have to remember that such concepts were a bit different in the 1800s, and there are two ways to consider the concept of “close.” The first would be playing a passage of music as quickly as possible, while the other is playing a specific lick as fast as possible. If you play llR “close” or fast enough, it will likely become buzzed.

Closing out this century, Instructions for the Trumpet and Drum (1897) claims that a close drag is also known as a ruff, while also presenting a four-stroke ruff (lrlR, ending with an accent):

In the 1930s, NARD gave us the first rudiment list, reusing that same structure that started with Howe, where llR is a ruff, and anything built using ruffs is a drag lick.

This no doubt has caused a lot of confusion for many drummers, as it seems like the NARD list should use “The Ruff,” “The Single Ruff,” and “The Double Ruff.” Either that, or just use “drag” for all of them. Single-stroke ruffs are ignored altogether by NARD.

In the famous 1925 book The Moeller Book, Sanford Moeller (yes, that’s the same Moeller you’re thinking of) unsurprisingly calls llR a ruff and everything else a drag — he brings up the half drag in a confusing manner similar to The Drummer’s and Fifer’s Guide. Moeller at least tries to provide a little more clarity:

We will now take up the DRAGS which are the most difficult of the rudimental beats. The first or fundamental is the HALF DRAG. This is executed in a manner similar to the Ruff but sounds distinctly different. The “two” taps are played more open and clean than in the ruff without the pressure. Use as little of the bounce as possible. The Ruff probably got its name from the sound of the beat which is like RUFF or perhaps still more like RUT. Let the name DRAG convey a more open dragging style yet not so open that it is unfinished. The Drag adds martial character and embellishment to a beat.

Moeller also brings back the tap ruff (which Moeller also calls “the roll of the single three stroke”) in addition to “the roll of four single strokes” — Moeller mentions that “the short single stroke rolls are also called RUFFS.”

Now we have yet another paradigm — the idea that drags and ruffs are both played as llR, but the drag is a more open ruff, with less of a buzzed or crushed character. Moreover, we now get a solid concept that a ruff with the number of strokes specified is meant to be played as singles.

Naturally, there is still little agreement throughout 20th-century drum books. The Rubank Elementary Method: Drums by Paul Yoder (1935) calls llR a ruff, while also specifying three-stroke and four-stroke ruffs played as singles.

Podemski’s Standard Snare Drum Method (1940) only uses drag for llR, while a single-stroked four-stroke ruff is presented. Charley Wilcoxon’s Modern Rudimental Swing Solos (1941) has a three-stroke ruff written as llR,* in addition to a four-stroke ruff played as singles, while drag is used for the extended grace note rudiments.

Ludwig’s Complete Drum Instructor (1942) includes single-stroked four-stroke ruffs, but describes the ruff as llR, noting that “This beat is also referred to as the ‘Half Drag’; although many rudimental books show the Half Drag as a separate rudiment, I see no difference and no reason for what seems to me a repetition. They are both written and executed alike.”

After 300 years, we see a return of the idea that ruffs and drags are the same. It also seems to be the case that some authors at this time didn’t have a concept of a simple drag — the simplest idea is a half drag, which again seems to be built upon ruffs.

Let’s jump ahead about forty years to the demise of the ruff with the PAS’ list of 40 rudiments. This list uses “drag” for everything involving llR, while also introducing the inscrutable single-stroke four and seven.

It seems like the PAS wanted to abandon “ruff” altogether, using drag or single-stroke four/seven to refer to the different ruff interpretations from throughout history.

The only problem is that these new single-stroke rudiments aren’t written with grace notes or an accent, suggesting that they are simply even rhythms. Very similar to the historic single-stroke drags, but still a different lick at the end of the day. Why exactly the PAS settled on this interpretation is a topic for another time.

Stranger still, Jay Wanamaker and Rob Carson’s somewhat obscure book International Drum Rudiments from 1984 has the single stroke four subtitled as “four stroke ruff,” with a rudimental interpretation (as it appears on the list) and an orchestral interpretation, with three grace notes going into an accented note.

Well then, I guess the single-stroke four and the four-stroke ruff are the same thing if you just know to reconceptualize the single-stroke four rhythm and ignore the specifics of how it’s written. Again, speculating on how anyone thought this would clear things up is beyond the scope of this article. The single stroke seven, meanwhile, has no additional commentary.

Yeesh, so much for being concise… To summarize, ruffs originally involved doubles before drag came to be the preferred term for describing such licks, with ruff being redefined as single-stroke versions of similar phrases. The double-stroke ruff came back in the 1850s, a more historically correct return to form, but one that confuses with the continued existence of other “drag” licks.

In the late 19th century, some authors concluded that a ruff is a closed drag, conceptualized as either so fast the rhythm becomes buzzed, or simply buzzed outright. Such authors still posit the existence of single-stroke ruffs, specified by saying “four-stroke ruff,” et cetera. This is, of course, ignored by some other authors who claim that the three-stroke ruff is meant to be played as llR.

So… what is a ruff then? Well, it could be: the same thing as a drag; the same thing as a closed drag, or any closed grace note figure; or a short single-stroke roll, which may or may not end in an accent. All this goes to show that there might not be an answer, as many authoritative sources contradict each other, so you would be justified in choosing any one definition.

This literally depends on who you ask, and the PAS frustratingly did not put its foot down in the 80s, instead providing a new source of confusion with the single stroke four/seven jive. In modern drum corps parlance, short single stroke rolls are usually called “single threes,” “single fours,” and so on, which seems like a deliberate distancing from older, confusing terminology.

However, at the end of the day, it’s often easy to understand what’s being implied when someone says ruff. “Four-stroke ruff” and the like almost certainly mean a pattern à la lrlR. The more generic “ruff” can be thought of as a closed grace note figure in an orchestral setting, where the exact number of strokes may or may not be discreetly played:

Use “three-stroke ruff” at your peril. Ditto for using ruff as a synonym for an open, rudimental drag. This has never really computed, since there are at least ten other drag licks that, throughout history, have never used ruff in their names.

There is one last thing worth mentioning: the “ruffle.” You can read about it here and decide whether or not it relates to any of this. I think I’ve had enough historical analysis for now!

* ^ My copy of Modern Rudimental Swing Solos is the more available re-engraved edition done by an editor named Richard Sakal, who seems to be responsible for some copy mistakes that leave certain passages unplayable. It’s possible this is not how the book was originally written, but I don’t know if Sakal is also responsible for the heinous use of grace notes for metered rolls, or if Wilcoxon was doing harebrained stuff from the get-go.