Practice this paradiddle groove 📓 Evans tom head comparison

Stan Bicknell tears into Alien Ant Farm's "Smooth Criminal" in a 60-second short, locking onto that nu-metal Michael Jackson cover with the kind of pocket and snare crack the tune demands. The caption nods to the iconic lyric while the playing does the talking. Worth the minute for anyone who still has the 2001 video burned into their memory.

@Isaiah Weatherspoon

Isaiah "Spoon" Weatherspoon flips Michael Jackson's "Can't Help It" into a pocket clinic, layering a drum remix over the silky Off the Wall era groove. The Berklee grad locks into the song's slinky swing without flattening it, treating the kit like another voice in the arrangement. A short, replayable reel that rewards a second listen on headphones.

Ryan Prim runs a 36-second shootout through the Evans lineup, cycling heads on the same snare so you can hear the coatings, plies, and dampening rings stack up back to back. It is the kind of A/B test that usually takes a YouTube rabbit hole to piece together, compressed into a single Short.

Useful if you have been weighing a G2 against an EC2, or wondering whether a Genera HD actually earns its keep over a stock head. Treat it as a starting point rather than gospel, since phone speakers flatten a lot of the low end, but it is a quick way to narrow your next head order before you commit a pack to the kit.

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Drum Drum Drum sets the DW Hybrid stock head against the Evans EQ4 on a Collector's PurpleCore maple 18x22, then gets out of the way and lets the mics decide. Same drum, same tuning, same room, with isolated single hits before moving into full beats so you can actually hear the attack and decay differences instead of guessing from spec sheets.

It's the kind of A/B that's hard to find online: two popular kick batters on a serious bass drum, with timestamps that let you jump straight to individual hits at 3:13 or the groove comparison at 4:59. Worth eight minutes if you're weighing a head swap and tired of marketing copy telling you what to hear.

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Jojo Mayer brought his ME/MACHINE solo set to the Vic Firth stage at EU Drum Show 2026, and "Simple Song" is anything but. Across roughly six minutes, he loops, layers, and improvises against his own programmed rig, the kind of one-man rhythmic conversation that built his reputation through Nerve.

What makes it worth the full sit is the texture. Mayer's hand technique reads almost calligraphic up close, ghost notes and rolls slipping in between the machine's pulse without ever sounding cluttered. It's a clean showcase of how he treats electronics as a duet partner rather than a backing track, and a reminder of why his clinics keep drawing the next generation of players studying control, dynamics, and feel.

Jacob Evans dropped five practice rules on r/drums that he wishes someone had handed him 21 years ago, and the through-line is simple: if your playing isn't flowing after years behind the kit, it's almost certainly how you practice, not how much. Walk away with a smarter way to set tempo, a saner way to climb it, and a notebook habit that makes progress impossible to ignore.

Start with your Goldilocks tempo. That's the BPM where you're landing about 90 percent, not the one where it's clean (too slow) and not the one where it falls apart (too fast). Lean slower than your ego wants. From there, cap yourself at 5 BPM up per session. It feels glacial, but Evans does the math: 50 to 100 BPM at 2 BPM a day is under three weeks, and when you arrive, it's actually under your hands. While you're at it, play every rep with what he calls the Stadium Mindset — full conviction, big motions, like you're kicking off a tune in front of 50,000 people. Half-in at practice means half-in on stage. Then bias toward frequency over duration: 20 focused minutes, five or six days a week, will bury a single two-hour weekend session. Finally, log tempo, not time. Three weeks from now you'll flip back and that exercise will be 20 BPM slower than today, and the progress you couldn't feel in the moment will be undeniable on the page.

Slow the metronome, raise the conviction, write down the BPM.

@Przemek Smaczny

Przemek Smaczny has a quick reel on splitting the standard paradiddle between hi-hat and snare, and it is a gateway exercise worth your next ten minutes on the practice pad or kit. The payoff: a single rudiment you already know suddenly turns into a vocabulary of grooves and fills, just by moving where the hands land.

Start with the basic single paradiddle, RLRR LRLL, at a tempo you can play cleanly. Now keep the right hand on the closed hi-hat and the left hand on the snare, and play the sticking exactly as written. The accents naturally shift between voices, which is what makes it sound musical instead of like a rudiment drill. Once that feels locked, flip it: lead with the left, so the snare carries the doubles. Then try inverted and reverse paradiddles, same orchestration. Common mistake to avoid: letting the snare hand get louder than the hi-hat hand. Keep the dynamic balance even first, then add a backbeat accent on beat 2 and 4 to turn it into a groove. Start around 70 to 80 bpm with a metronome, push to 100 only when the doubles stay clean.

Apply it today to anything with a steady eighth-note feel. The lesson is small, but the door it opens, from linear grooves to Gadd-style snare work, is not.