The Weight Room: Flam Accents

We took a quick look at an exercise that works your Flam Accents a while ago, combined with Flam Taps. You can check it out here if you missed it.

Like flam taps, flam accents break down into triple strokes. Try playing a few flam accents with your hands on different drums (or one off the drum, like on your leg) and you'll hear/see the triple stroke. Because of that, it's a good idea to work on your triple strokes independently.

Here's one of my favorite ways to practice flam accents. Try it without the foot pattern until the hands are very smooth.

Original pattern:

The sticking (not including the grace notes) is just alternating, beginning with either hand. In fact, you should be doing this starting with either hand.

Variation 1:

As before, use both stickings.

Variation 2:

Take enough time with these exercises that they become very comfortable at a variety of tempos (tempi? Tempe?). Then, as Steve Smith says, don't force it. As you practice flam accents and their variations, they will begin to, "naturally enter your playing."

Happy drumming!

The Weight Room: Flam Accent/Tap Groove

This one's pretty simple, but an awesome exercise to get your hands moving and your flams to smooth out.

It looks like this:

It is played as four flam accents followed by two flam taps.

Once you've got it smoothed out, here are some cool ways to apply it to the kit:

• Play it over jazz feet - light quarters on all four beats, crisp hat on two and four.
• Hi-hat on two and four, with bass drum notes on the flams.
• Hat two and four, kick notes on the 16th before or after the flams.
• Play the 16ths shuffled, hat on two and four - and try out some of the kick patterns mentioned previously. 
• Put the iPod on shuffle, and play it along with whatever comes up. 

Above all, make it groove. The more musical it can be, the more you're doing it right!

As always, happy drumming!