Double Stroke Rate Calculator

Then you grab a practice pad and metronome and begin practicing double stroke roll. You select a tempo of ninety beats per minute and begin tapping out sixteenth notes. What you hear sound good; it’s smooth and even. Chances are, however, that your dominant hand is rushing ahead and the weak hand are dragging behind and crushing its rebounds.

Speed isn’t merely moving the beat faster, it’s about getting two hands to create equal sounds at ever-smaller increments of time. Input your selected tempo and subdivide to let the calculator do all the math for you. This free you from guessing whether you are actualy increasing your speed or just covering up imperfections by playing louder.

Why Evenness Is More Important Than Speed

While most drummer will conceive their work in terms of ‘beats per minute’, these figures represent the pulse rather than density of the number of times they produce a stroke. If you choose to play sixteenth notes at a tempo of ninety bpm you agree to tap the practice pad four separate times within each beat. Across both hands, that equates to a total of three hundred and sixty individual strokes per minute. Even though it might sound doable, what you haven’t considered yet is that there is one hundred and eighty unique movements required from each hand in that timeframe.

Your brain doesn’t process this as one long movement; instead, you’re asking two different limbs to work together at speed with distinctly different muscle memory pattern for how you perform the downstrokes and upstrokes. Many players don’t consider surface response as a critical factor. Gum rubber pads responds consistently through long playing sessions and provide balanced rebound. High-tensioned marching snares may appear faster as they return the stick more aggressively in your hand. It’s often easy to think you’ve upgraded your technique rather than just getting used to a new physical environment.

You’ll see from the reference table on this page that response factors change the perceived difficulty of a particular tempo. Over-reliance on a bouncy surface can result in fragile technique that falls apart when transferred to another instrument with a lower rebound such as a pillow or perhaps a floor tom.

At nearly all stages of development, speed alone isn’t as important than evenness. This is where the calculator does some measuring, working out the milliseconds between each tap of the stroke. It’s a lifetime in terms of how the brain processes it when you’re tapping at lower tempos with more than three hundred milliseconds between hands. You’re pushing yourself towards a thousand-plus strokes per minute and now the space has narrowed to a span of milliseconds, with sixty milliseconds or less between each tap.

There’s no room for compensation here. If you miss the rebound and the next strike is in less then a tenth of a second, you can’t muscle it into place. It must be clean enough to work with the physics instead of against it.

The other factor affecting the strategic nature of practice time is amount of time spent practicing. In a ten-minute slot played moderately, you’ll have thousands of repetitions under your belt. This reinforces whatever endurance you may have but will amplify any technical flaws present in your foundation. You might rush through the left hand during the first minute. By the time you’re done with your set, you’ll have rushed it two thousand times. Thinking about how many strokes you do per second helps clarify what the calculator shows; repeating anything inaccurately becomes effective error training.

These are not numbers on a screen to be chased. They are meant to create a trusty engine in your hands. It is a double stroke roll that maintain itself under varying circumstances: change the speed, alter the dynamics, or walk on different surfaces and it will hold up. Control should of lead to speed, not the other way around.

If you play cleanly at three hundred and sixty strokes per minute, pushing it to five hundred will be an exercise in refinement, not reinvention. Begin slowly so that each subsequent stroke is equal in both volume and tone. Check the results with the data. If the numbers say you are fast but the sound says you are uneven, trust the sound. If not, believe the sound. If you let the clock trick you, it will always lie.