Lately my drum practice involves doing drills of this form:

  • Start with a standard rock backbeat (kicks on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4).
  • Fill in ghost notes and kicks in 16th note slots at random.
  • Practice the resulting groove until fluency.
  • Repeat.

Or:

  • Start with a three (or four, or six, or eight) note fill.
  • Figure out every combination of hands and feet you can use to play those four notes.
  • Practice each one until fluency.

This kind of enumeration is a pain, so for fun I made a React Native app to randomly generate grooves that satisfy those constraints.

I’d say… maybe half of them are worth practicing. Here are some of the better ones:

If someone knows of an app that already does things like this for me… please let me know!