Eleven Stroke Roll
Learn How To Play The Eleven Stroke Roll Drum Rudiment!
This next 40 drum rudiments free lesson is about another pattern from the drum roll family of drum rudiments - the eleven stroke roll. As you can see from the sheet music below, this rudiment incorporates five sets of double strokes and a single stroke. Hence, if you haven’t bothered to learn how to play the single stroke roll and the double stroke roll, we encourage you to do so before tacking on the eleven stroke roll. Luckily for you, we have free drum lessons on this website about those two drum rudiments.
The structure of an eleven stroke roll is quite similar to the ones on the five stroke roll, seven stroke roll, and nine stroke roll drum rudiments. If you have practiced any of these drum rudiments beforehand you should have no problems at all with this one. This rudiment naturally changes the hand leading from measure to measure. Still, as you get to higher speeds it gets harder to do. So have that in mind while practicing the eleven stroke roll.
In the video lesson, Lionel Duperron explains how to practice the eleven stroke roll on a practice pad by playing the double strokes as 32nd notes and the single stroke as a 16th note. When he takes the eleven stroke roll and applies it to the drum set in a couple of drum beats and drum fills, he plays the doubles as 16th notes and the single as an 8th note. The pattern is still an eleven stroke roll, Lionel just messes around with the note values.
Once you feel confident in your abilities to play the eleven stroke roll, take the next drum beats and drum fills to your kit and start shedding away.
We start things off with a very cool mix of a tom-tom drum beat with a broken hi-hat drum beat. The eleven stroke roll is broken up between the hi-hat and the snare drum on count 1, the floor tom and the snare drum on count 2, and the hi-hat and snare drum once again on count 3. Lionel Duperron could’ve kept playing the hi-hat on count 2, but by displacing the double to the floor tom he added a totally different feel to the drum beat. That, in conjunction with the syncopated snare shot on the “and” of count 3, makes for a very unique sounding drum beat.
You can use the idea of displacing hi-hat notes to other drums on all the other free drum lessons on drum rudiments in this website. This is a very cool tool for coming up with creative drum beats of your own.
The eleven stroke roll in the next drum beat is broken up between the ride cymbal and the hi-hat on the first two counts. On the third count, the right hand moves to the floor tom to play the last double of the eleven stroke roll. The left hand plays the single stroke as a snare shot. When you can play the hand pattern comfortably add the bass drum on all quarter notes.
Exercise #3 incorporates the eleven stroke roll into a drum fill. The left hand is kept playing on the snare drum throughout the whole pattern. The biggest challenge you’ll find in this drum fill is playing double strokes on all toms with the right hand. Playing consistent sounding double strokes on soggy surfaces like the ones from tom-toms using only bounce is not possible. Hence, the doubles will end up sounding muddy. Use full wrist strokes or a snap of the fingers on the drum stick, after playing the first stroke of the double with the wrist, to get perfectly sounding doubles.
The snare strokes played with the left hand on exercise #3 are kept exactly the same on exercise #4, and are executed with the left hand also. As for the right hand, just like on the previous exercise, it’s responsible for playing the doubles on the toms. On exercise #3 we went from the hi-tom, to the mid-tom, to the floor tom. Here, the right hand follows the opposite path, starting on the floor tom and ending on the hi-tom.
After going through this lesson you can move on to learn how to play the thirteen stroke and the fifteen stroke roll drum rudiments, and how to apply them to the drum set through a couple of creative drum beats and drum fills.