how to use Stick Control

JPW said:

Yeah and quite seriously, if you manage to pull off every excercise there is in SC and A&R with varying dynamic levels and tempos (without and with metronome) like Stone suggests without breaking your hands, your technique can't be far from optimal =P

I mean at the end of A&R there are these excercises with accents and rolls and buzzes, go try to do those with improper technique. =P

Yup, I'm in love with these books. Can't wait to see how my hand look 10 or 20 years from now.

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They will do your hands a load of good, but they can be used to work so much else, too.

E.g. pg. 5 is a treasure trove for coordination and independence. Simply apply an ostinato with one or two limbs and spread the exercises between the other two. Play straight and swung. Play that through different subdivisions over the same ostinato...and so on and so on. I always tell my pupils when I give them their first copy of pg. 5 to guard it and protect it because they're going to come back to it time and again.

Boomka said:

They will do your hands a load of good, but they can be used to work so much else, too.

E.g. pg. 5 is a treasure trove for coordination and independence. Simply apply an ostinato with one or two limbs and spread the exercises between the other two. Play straight and swung. Play that through different subdivisions over the same ostinato...and so on and so on. I always tell my pupils when I give them their first copy of pg. 5 to guard it and protect it because they're going to come back to it time and again.

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Yes, I know, for example Lang's Advanced foot technique and creative coordination DVD is exactly that + odd groupings with multipedal orchestration, even Benny Greb's DVD can be thought this way, with some creativity you can evolve SC-pages to those type of excercises. So there's not much these books don't secretly cover. =P

But one thing I don't like (because I'm a perfectionist) is the fact that not all the permutations are practiced with SC. I mean even if we take the 4-note grouping approach which SC seems to use. For example if you look closely at flam exersices, the excercises with left hand lead stop before all the combinations were investigated that we did with right hand lead. I like to practice everything identically with left and right leads. Of course I CAN do them, and I think Stone just tried to make the book look "prettier" this way. But as I said the perfectionist inside me isn't happy about it. =)

The author suggest practicing stick control one hour a day as well. I use a timer and set it for three minutes for each exercise. I will go through twenty exercises which equals one hour. I will use a metronome when learning a new exercise and to gauge my progress. I will also focus on making the exercises as even sounding as possible. Another thing is focus on being as relaxed as possible and take the tempo up until you feel tension and then back off, I also play very soft and loud. After an hour of that your hands and arms feel like noodles.

There's an interesting way to use Stone's book that I was experimenting with way back in the mid 70s when I was on staff at the Armed Forces School of Music--

Use the single beats starting on page 5 as a drum set exercise between all four limbs, strictly reading EVERY OTHER right with your right foot and EVERY OTHER left with your left foot.

I discovered this book through my teacher in college who told me that the flam section in particular would really benefit my independence on the drum set, and man was he right. I don't believe in the 20 times thing. I do each one until I feel solid on it and then move on, which is always more than 20 times. As a teacher, I'm always amazed at how many times the student thinks they're playing the right sticking but aren't. Forces you into new patterns. I usually go open-closed-open as well.

This would be a great topic to sticky, along with a similar thread on Syncopation.

Stick Control will sure challenge your patience. Once you accept the tedium and treat the exercises as conditioners, you can get good results. I particularly like the closed roll studies. My advice is: be sitting down, don't get too hung up on the 20 reps or on taking it sequentially, use a click, and focus on accuracy over speed. I would supplement it with Accents and Rebounds, and Joe Morello's Master Studies books.

On the drums, I've been working through the first section applying the stickings to triplets, split between the LH/RF (R=RF, L=LH), while playing jazz time on the HH/cym. So, #5 (RLRR LRLL) gives you: RLR-RLR-LLR-LRR | LRL-LRL-RRL-RLL.

My major reservation about the book is that the musical content of the exercises gets a little buried. For example, you can get the Stone pattern RLRR LRRL (#33) by playing 1 2& &4 (Reed, old p. 33, #3) with the RH and filling out the 8ths with the left; the Reed version is an actual musical idea, the Stone is just physical coordination. I think it's better for your musicianship to be taking a musical idea and translating it into drummer language, vs. taking a piece of physical coordination and trying to figure out how it's musical, you know? So, many of the drumset things that are normally done with the first section, I do with Syncopation instead.

toddbishop said:

My major reservation about the book is that the musical content of the exercises gets a little buried. For example, you can get the Stone pattern RLRR LRRL (#33) by playing 1 2& &4 (Reed, old p. 33, #3) with the RH and filling out the 8ths with the left; the Reed version is an actual musical idea, the Stone is just physical coordination. I think it's better for your musicianship to be taking a musical idea and translating it into drummer language, vs. taking a piece of physical coordination and trying to figure out how it's musical, you know? So, many of the drumset things that are normally done with the first section, I do with Syncopation instead.

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Check this out - Syncopated Rolls for the Modern Drummer. It's exactly what you're talking about.

Blackley's entire approach is to start with a musical/rhythmic phrase and then us various subdivisions and stickings to fill the space between and connect the plateus of the phrase. This way, your technical study is all within the context of building a functional rhythmic vocabulary.

P.S. I second the sticky idea. Perhaps an amalgamation of all the threads on the subject? We should start pestering the site admins...

A student has one of the Blackley books coming- I'm very interested to check that out.

I'll email the admins- hopefully they won't laugh at me and call me a noob. This would be a great venue for capturing some of the oral tradition surrounding those books. Or maybe I need to start a wiki.

toddbishop said:

A student has one of the Blackley books coming- I'm very interested to check that out.

I'll email the admins- hopefully they won't laugh at me and call me a noob. This would be a great venue for capturing some of the oral tradition surrounding those books. Or maybe I need to start a wiki.

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Which book? SRMD is the jumping off point, but Essence of Jazz Drumming is also off the hook...

Pulling this out of the ashes.

Has anyone got a specific routine in relation to Stick Control? I pulled it out the other day. I always feel guilty not going through the first page as it's a good 'top-up' but I always find myself never going past them...

Does anyone single out exercises and just focus purely on them? I am trying to make the book versatile to help me.

Play pages 5-8 with varying foot patterns, including samba bass drum pattern, left foot clave (rumba and son), all off beats in the feet, triplets against eighth notes in the hands, etc. then swap the hands and feet entirely.

And there was me rolling it up and whacking the cymbals with it.

Mark_S said:

And there was me rolling it up and whacking the cymbals with it.

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Haaah! Gave me a good chuckle there.

Torkerz said:

Pulling this out of the ashes.

Has anyone got a specific routine in relation to Stick Control? I pulled it out the other day. I always feel guilty not going through the first page as it's a good 'top-up' but I always find myself never going past them...

Does anyone single out exercises and just focus purely on them? I am trying to make the book versatile to help me.

Click to expand...

My basic routine these days is pretty basic: 30 minutes a day (when I can) on the single beats section, broken up with 10 minutes each on full strokes, half strokes and low strokes. I'll play each exercise for one minute. I'll stick with the same set of exercises for a week or more before going on to the next. I started out by playing #1-10 as full strokes, #11-20 as half strokes, and #21-30 as low strokes. On week #2, I'll move to #11-20 as full, #21-30 as half, and #31-40 as low. And then I'll continue that process until I've moved through them all. At the very least it's very good maintenance work, but it also helps improve my speed and control over time.

Reviving an older thread ...

FWIW, since I began using Stone's "Accents & Rebounds" for my handwork (traditional and matched), I now find myself using those initial pages of "Stick Control" almost entirely for feet ... i.e., L=left foot and R=right foot.

Of course you can work from whatever speed upwards is helpful for pushing your footwork forward. The lack of accents in these exercises makes it a bit easier to concentrate on the foot work, whether you play along with the hands or keep your hands on your lap to really concentrate on how your feet are doing against the metronome, it's a good workout either way.

Speaking of hands: sometimes I try to complicate things a bit by playing the L and R for feet, while keep a constant paradiddle or other 4- or 8-note phrase going on the hands - anything that's different from whatever the (foot) pattern is from each given Stick Control exercise. For me this quickly gets to be fairly challenging, but slowing it all down helps get my older brain into the proper groove.

(Since I'm a left-handed/left-footed player L=kick and R=hh ... but that doesn't matter since Stick Control is all symmetrically written anyhow.)

My teacher always told me to work on this daily, whether its, morning evening or night.
I use it everyday and write little black dots on what exercices I already did.
From monday to friday I usually do it in the morning one new exercice at three different speed, so three time 20 or 30 reps, one new exercice every day, and on week end it depends, I usually play for a few hours and dont really keep track of that training with stick control.

shred36 said:

My teacher always told me to work on this daily, whether its, morning evening or night.
I use it everyday and write little black dots on what exercices I already did.
From monday to friday I usually do it in the morning one new exercice at three different speed, so three time 20 or 30 reps, one new exercice every day, and on week end it depends, I usually play for a few hours and dont really keep track of that training with stick control.

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Excellent, sounds like you've got a solid practice habit in place!

Rather than the little black dot approach, I've created one-a-month worksheets for each significant practice book/routine I'm working on with a column for each day of the month and the particulars of the exercise down the rows.

I've attached a pdf example for Stick Control - which again, I actually use for "Foot Control" exercises with L and R for my feet. I'm a lefty, so things are reversed for most. I use Stone's "Accents & Rebounds" for handwork - which is similar to Stick Control but with accents, thanks to Joe Morello's input.

I print off one page of each per month (and use a check, or put the tempo rate, or a line through, whatever, on each column based on actual practice). 3-hole punched, these go into a binder that sits next to my kit. It's an organized way to remember to work through various practice routines and also log progress over time.

Anyhow, perhaps if these attachments are of interest to anyone I can upload some more I currently use for other well-known drum books...

I like the idea a lot, if you used excel instead of a printed paper you could draw some cool graphs and maybe have it suggest you exercises you did not practice for a long time.
Do you know other drummers keeping track like you do ?

shred36 said:

I like the idea a lot, if you used excel instead of a printed paper you could draw some cool graphs and maybe have it suggest you exercises you did not practice for a long time.
Do you know other drummers keeping track like you do ?

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In fact I made those pdf files from Excel spreadsheets I'd created. They're pretty straightforward, as you can tell. Adding graphs is a neat idea - thanks!

I just tried to attach a few of them as samples so others could edit them to suit their own needs. Unfortunately I keep getting "Invalid" file errors ... which perhaps indicates you can't upload live active files like Excel (which theoretically could have a malicious macro from an ill-intended individual). Sorry ... unless I can figure out how to upload my Excel files you'll have to make your own (not a tough assignment.)

As for other drummers doing this, no, I don't personally know of anyone but I'm sure given how compulsive most drummers get about their kits, there are probably quite a few of us out there keeping medical charts on our practice time like this ;-)

Enjoy!

Cool I'll try to make something that could do the job, how do you manage to keep track when you have exercices with different books or dvd's ?
I usually work with one book at the time because trying to keep track of more than one is confusing me and also because I write directly on the book itself.