Any Advice on some good ways to build singles speed. I'm pretty slow and I've basically been using a metronome and doing 16th note singles varying tempos. It just seems that when I try to build to go faster then the quality of the strokes are compromised/uneven. So yeah, Help please.

this might seem what your not trying to do but when i tried fixing my doubles speeds just get good and doubles and triples. if you can play triples as fast sextuplets then you can most likely do singles really fast too. this is what i do. not sure if it works for anyone else though.

1. Set metronome at slow tempo like 100bpm.
2. Play 16th notes focusing on quality of sound, height of rise, even strokes, etc, until your hands are extremely comfortable at that speed and you have a good sound. I suggest doing this at the current tempo for no less than 20 minutes.
3. Increase tempo by 1 or 2 clicks and repeat.

This will take a long while, but all good things come with time.

i know this is not original because there are many variations of the ladder eccersize out there but i put the met. on about 140-160 and do...
32R 32L 32R 32L
16R 16L 16R 16L
8R 8L 8R 8L
4R 4L 4R 4L
2R 2L 2R 2L
1R 1L 1R 1L


and then climb back up the ladder backwards, i do this for as long as my arms/wrists can handle then cool down with some slow 8's at around 120

Here's an exercise we played at Constitution to work on single-stroke quality. It's a variation on the 16th note pyramid. Try alternating between the tap pyramid and the 32nd note variation... they will reinforce each other. It's just a matter of building the endurance to play a ton of strokes on one hand at a time, and then coordinating the two hands to play the single-stroke rolls. Typical tempo range is 80- 100 BPM.

If you can work that exercise up, shorter single-stroke rolls at faster tempi become pretty easy.

Here is my eccersise that i wrote. it is quite basic but it gets the job done and also at the end some of the accent taps get a cool little grove going.

Here's an easy trick to boost up your speed. Play straight 8th notes on your right hand as fast as you can (with a met of course!) and then after a while, switch and work your left hand. If your hands can play that fast separately, all you have to do is build the mental coordination between your hands. Try this over and over:

(8th notes) R R R R R R R R (16th notes) RLRLRLRLRLRLRLRL (Repeat)

my tech told me once and i thought it was a sort of unorthadoxt way of building speed,but he said to play them low, so i went home and played my singles low for a minute and after a while i could tell i was getting some speed and after building that up for a while i could eventually play some solid fast singles so i would just say to play them low to get some speed

I like to use the SCV warm-up piece "Eighths" to build speed and timing. The idea is to keep even eighths with one hand while playing triplets and sixteenths in the other.


http://owenspercussion.com/Documents/SCV07_BatteryPercussion_Packet.pdf