One Handed Roll Applications

In this free drum lesson, Jared Falk teaches you how to incorporate the one handed roll into your drum beats. Some of the exercises you’ll find within work great for rock-based music. This free drum lesson includes examples for heavy-metal and bossa nova as well, so you can see how applicable and musical the one handed roll can actually be.

The exercises from this free drum lesson are geared towards those who’ve practiced and perfected the one handed roll. If you’re not one of those cats, you should skip this lesson and watch the video “One Handed Roll” instead. There, you’ll learn how to play the one handed roll accurately and how to develop it with a couple of exercises. As a bonus, the one handed roll is broken down for you with slow motion video, so you can see exactly how to perform this powerful technique.

The one handed roll is performed with your snare/ weaker hand for all these patterns. After achieving a fairly good level of control over these exercises at various tempos, switch your hands and use your hi-hat/ lead hand on the snare drum instead. By doing so you’ll not only even out your hands, but improve on your independence as well.

Exercise #8 is basically a bossa nova groove where the 2-3 bossa nova clave is played on the toms, while a 16th note one handed roll is performed on the snare. The use of the one handed roll in Brazilian styles of music can actually come quite in handy. Although Jared uses it in a bossa nova groove here, it’s way more useful to use it when dealing with Samba-based styles of music. You see, Samba is mostly played at fairly high tempos and features a myriad of 16th note-based patterns on the snare drum. It’s quite troublesome to play fast single strokes using finger technique or wrist strokes with only one hand under these conditions. So you can actually use the one handed roll to play 16th note snare patterns quite effortlessly.

If you’d like to expand on the content from this video lesson, take bass drum patterns from other free drum lessons and combine them with the various hand patterns you’ll find within. Another cool idea is to use dynamic drumming techniques like opening-closing the hi-hat to challenge you a bit more and to spice these patterns even more.