Developing Hand Technique through time playing

This idea makes use of the beat placements and develops an idea for working on hand technique for your non-lead hand.

The exercise is pretty simple. You play quarter notes in the right hand on the ride cymbal, and you fill in the remaining eight notes with the left hand. As you move from four quarter notes in the first bar, to no quarter notes in the last bar, your left hand has to do more and more work.

Practice with the feet keeping time; bass drum on all four, hi-hat two and four. Later, you can use the bass drum to accent the quarter notes while keeping the hi-hat on 2 and 4.

Use a metronome and slowly increase the tempo.

You play the eight notes straight and swung.

There is no reason why you can't switch hands to work on the other hand, move the snare drum part around the kit, or fill in the gaps with the bass drum instead. Experiment and use the idea to work on your technical weak points.

The PDF gives you the first four bars filling in the space with triplets, and also with sixteenths. You should be able to work out the rest.

Have fun. Make music.