How To Do A Drum Roll

Today, I'm going to show you how to do a drum roll. It's not to be confused with a drum fill. A fill is what you might play at the end of a bar, leaving from one section to another song.

A drum roll is actually, I suppose, the way a drum might achieve sustained pitch, because we can't hold a note the way a trumpet player or a singer would. So, what we do is effectively a stream of very fast notes. There are different types of drum rolls: there's an opened roll, a closed roll, a double stroke roll.

I'm going to just today focus on the double stroke roll, which is effectively two notes with each hit. The way we are going to do this is quite slowly. We want two strokes of each hand.

The trick is to actually let the first stroke rebound. So, make sure the first stroke comes back. We'll take it slowly, two rights, two lefts.

A lot of people would play this by accenting the first note, which is actually going to give you a lumpy sounding roll. It might sound okay when you speed it up. Again, as I've said before, there are different ways to do things.

I like to try to achieve an even sounding roll, so all the notes are the same volume. The motion starts to change slightly as we speed up. So, obviously, you can't achieve the same height as you are playing faster.

We have to sacrifice a little bit of height in order to get some speed. So, rather than bringing the stick the same height all the times, so you hit the drum, and then pull in slightly with your fingers on the second note. But the trick is not to hold it down, but actually to bring the stick back up.

Once you get it going, it should almost look like you are playing single strokes. So, again, hit the drum, stick returns, pull in slightly with your fingers, not to the point where you tense up, but just a little bit. So, if we match that up with the left hand, we get this motion.

A little bit quicker, you start to get what sounds like a drum roll. It's quite important that you play; I go for the center of the drum to get a crispy sound. But either way, if your hands are closer together, the tips of the sticks are closed together; you are going to get a more even tone.

You are going to get further away from the center of the drum; it should give you some dynamic variation. All casual drummers would do that a lot. The other thing that's kind of worth mentioning is, well, making sure you have a subdivision in mind.

So if we start by thinking of 16th notes, or we can think of sextuplets, so effectively, we are playing the same sticking, but in different rates of speed. The way you might use this, that's how you make a drum roll. .