Breaking The Endurance Exercise Down...WAY Down

Ok, so I got a little high to practice drums today. Just a teensy bit high. Well, more like alot. The thing I really did was dig into the endurance exercise (outside of playing along with Marvin Gaye's greatest Motown singles which is a whole nother thing in itself). Mostly the single stroke one, but later I found it helped me with my double stroke one as well.

Its probably worth explaining in depth at this point, but the endurance exercise I'm doing is like this:
there are 16 counts total (i count it as 8 and 8 in my head, but really its written as 4 beats divided into 16th notes) and it goes into double time for first only the last count, then the last 2, then the last 3, until it goes all the way up to being in double time the whole time. Each pattern is held 4 times, so first you play 15 16th notes followed by 2 32nd notes 4 times, then 14 16th notes followed by 4 32nd notes and on and on.


OK. One of the first things I did was with how I was counting it. It used to be if for example i was counting the one where the 32nds come in on beat 12, I would count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1, 2, 3, and then quit counting while the 32nds went on. So the first thing I changed was I started to count 1-8 1-8 every time out loud, no matter where the switch was.

Another thing I did was change it to an exercise that was 8 counts total. Then on the even numbered ones I would accent all the single strokes and not the doubles (still counting through). For the odd ones, I would accent the single strokes only on the hand where the additional single stroke lied. This was the most effective of all the drills for correcting my weak spots.

For these I divided the exercise up into only evens and only odds. So I would do 8 counts solid single strokes (16th notes) 4 times, then 6 counts single stroke and 2 counts with the 32nd notes, then 4 and 4, 2 and 6 and finally all 8 counts with the 32nds and then back down.

I counted this 3 ways: 1-8 every time, then only counting the single strokes and then only counting the double strokes, which seemed to help my ear (ex. single stroke, single stroke, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Anyways if you are having trouble upping the tempo on the endurance exercise this is probably a great way to go into it, because you address every single beat, so you can really isolate the exact spot where you begin to have trouble.

Also its worth doing extra single strokes with your weak hand before getting into this.