Flams and Spacing and Taps, Oh My!

Recently I’ve been amusing myself by playing “Concert” style flam spacing with “Marching” style parts…. but I’ve been doing it with the grace notes on the beat like in a one-hand exercise.  The result is a displaced accent similar to the “grandma” rudiment, but utilizing the same mechanical motions as in regular flam rudiments. Teasing all of that apart has been very entertaining.

I figured out a while ago that “Flam Triplets” have three consecutive taps and “Flam-Paradiddles” have four.  I extended that out all the way to eight consecutive taps, and now I have a series of interpreted rudiment combinations to develop my taps and challenge my timing and placement.

Here is a list of combinations based on Flams, Flam Drags, Cheeses, and Flam-5s.

Flam Grace Note Timing and Tap Control

I wrote out the Flam-5 spacing as 5-tuplets, but it could be played as the Cheese Triplet followed by a two 16ths double as well.

Happy drumming!