Creating a Stroke Guide

This is a great feature for drummers which massively simplifies the process of figuring out the strokes required to play an accented rudiment efficiently.

If you’re not already familiar with the stroke types (Full, Down, Tap, Up) or don’t know what their purpose is, then check out the video at the bottom of this post.

If you already understand the value of these strokes, then you’ll love how easy PolyNome makes it to calculate them.

How It Works

  1. Enter a rudiment into Line 1 of Sequencer 1 and assign a sticking (using R, L) and accents.
  2. Tap in Sequencer 2, tap the “…” and choose “Create Stroke Guide”

That’s it!

PolyNome will take the rudiment you entered in Seq 1 and replace the contents of Seq 2 with a Stroke Guide.

Line 1 of Seq 2 shows the strokes for the right hand.

Line 2 of Seq 2 shows the strokes for the left hand.

You can use the mixer faders to listen to the voice prompts for just one hand, or the other, or both.

Here it is in action…

What are Full, Down, Tap and Up strokes?

There are 4 kinds of stroke: Tap, Full, Down, and Up.

If you use them correctly, they make playing accented rudiments much easier because your sticks always end up in the correct place to begin the next stroke.

For example, if you played an accented note, and the next note you need to play is unaccented, then you’d use a Down stroke which leaves the tip of the stick close to the drum.
If you hadn’t thought about what was coming next, then you might habitually let the stick bounce high. When it’s time to play the quiet note it’s hard to do because the stick is a long way from the drum which means the stroke will be loud unless you do extra work to slow it down before it hits.

The easiest way to play a quiet, unaccented, note is to start with the tip of the stick close to the head. It’s almost impossible to play a loud note if you do that (and don’t lift up first)

In contrast, the easiest way to play a loud, accented, note is to start with the tip of the stick away from the drum. That gives you a run up and, without trying, that note will be louder.

The different strokes are simply the combinations of different start and end positions for the tip of the stick…

Tap Stroke: starts low, and ends low. It’s used for a quiet note that will be followed by another quiet note.
Full Stroke: starts high and ends high. It’s used for an accented note that will be followed by another accented note.
Down Stroke: starts high and ends low. It’s used for an accented note that will be followed by a quiet note.
Up Stroke: starts low and ends high. It’s used for a quiet note that will be followed by an accented note.

Figuring Out Which Strokes To Use (the manual way)

In order to figure out which stroke to use for each note of a rudiment, you need to do the following for each note in the pattern:

  1. Look at the note you want to figure out a stroke type for. We’ll call it X.
  2. Find the next note in the pattern that will be played by the same hand. We’ll call it Y.
  3. Reference the options below and pick the correct stroke, then write the stroke letter under the note.

Options:

X is accented, Y is accented: Full stroke (F)
X is accented, Y is unaccented: Down stroke (D)
X is unaccented, Y is accented: Up stroke (u)
X is unaccented, Y is unaccented: Tap stroke (t)

If you can’t find a Y note because you get to the end of the rudiment, loop back to the start and find the first occurrence of the same hand.

Once you’re done, you can practice playing the rudiment using the strokes you’ve figured out, and the accents will just happen automatically.

You should find that the rudiment is much easier to play.

If you want to see the process in action, here’s a 45 minute VIP lesson from JoeCrabtree.com explaining the strokes and the laborious process you used to have to go through before PolyNome existed!

Enjoy!