Triple Stroke Roll | Rudiment Explanation

The Triple Stroke Roll in action.

In this Triple Stroke Roll drum lesson, we're going to go through how to play this drum rudiment, and how to apply it to beats and fills. One of the biggest benefits of learning your rudiments is giving yourself new ideas and inspiration, to enhance the language of your playing. This is also one of the keys to learning to improvise in real time on a drum set!

Sticking and technique.

The sticking is just as easy as it sounds:

R R R L L L

That said, getting your fingers involved is the most important aspect of your hand technique, and we can't over state this! To gain any real speed with this as a snare drum exercise, you'll need to keep your fulcrum tight (the area between the big knuckle of your index finger, and the pad of your thumb), and pull against that with your back three fingers.

Focus on keeping this light and with lots of finger and wrist action! Keep your elbow and shoulder movement to a minimum.

Triple Stroke Roll Beats.

With our beats, we want to make this rudiment application organic. So with that said, we're going to isolate the Triple Stroke aspect of this, and use just 3 strokes in a row. Mastering this technique on the snare first will greatly aid in this motion.

Triple Stroke Roll Fills.

Applying this rudiment to a fill, we're going to again use 3 strokes in a row on one hand. The difference is that in this case we're going to take advantage of having several strokes on one hand, as it frees up our other hand for movements around the drum kit. This can be great if you want to, for example, keep your right hand on the floor tom to get big boomy sound, and then move your left hand to upper toms or a crash cymbal.