The Paradiddle: What It Is and How to Play It on the Kit
What a paradiddle is, how to play it evenly, and three ways to use it on the drum kit: on the pad, as a groove and as a fill. With playable notation.
Posted by
Ant JamesRelated reading
Drum Beats: The Four Grooves Behind Almost Every Song
You don’t need a thousand drum beats. Four families cover most songs: the backbeat, four on the floor, funk and the shuffle. Hear and play each one.
Simple Drum Beats: 6 Grooves, Each One Step Harder
Six simple drum beats in order, each changing one thing from the last. Play along with the notation and drum kit view and find your level.
Drum Fills: What They Are and How to Build Your Own
What a drum fill is, why yours might not land, and how to build fills from one sticking — one beat long, then two, then round the kit. Playable examples.
The paradiddle is the rudiment most drummers learn first and use least. It sits on the practice pad, gets played a thousand times, and never quite makes it onto the kit.
Which is a shame, because it’s one of the most useful things you can own as a drummer. It’s a groove, a fill and a way of moving round the kit, all hiding inside eight strokes.
Below you’ll find the paradiddle three ways — on its own, as a groove and as a fill — each one playable. Press play, watch the kit and the sticking, then play it yourself.
What is a paradiddle?
A paradiddle is two single strokes followed by a double: R L R R, then the same thing starting on the other hand, L R L L. The name is the sound of it — “pa-ra” for the singles, “did-dle” for the double.
That switch is the whole trick. Because the double sends the next group to the other hand, the pattern leads with your right, then your left, then your right again. Most of what we play leads with one hand; the paradiddle makes both hands equal.
Play it in sixteenths with an accent on the first note of each group. The accent should be clearly louder, and the other three notes should all sit at the same low height. If the double sounds like a flam, or the second stroke of it disappears, slow down until it doesn’t.
Position follows the click, including through silent gap-click bars.
How to practise it so it actually improves
Playing the paradiddle for five minutes without listening is how drummers end up with a pad-only rudiment. Instead, set yourself one small target, check where you are against it, practise the gap and check again. I call that the Set-Met Loop: Set, Yet, Get, Met?
- Set: “Four bars at 80 with every accent the same height.”
- Yet: play it once with the metronome and be honest about what happened.
- Get: work on the one thing that broke — usually the double.
- Met?: play the four bars again. Passed? Set the next target.
Ten of those loops will do more for you than half an hour of playing it on repeat. Count your loops, not your minutes.
The paradiddle as a groove
Here’s where it gets interesting. Put your right hand on the hi-hat and leave your left hand on the snare, and play exactly the same sticking.
The accented lefts land on beats 2 and 4 — so the backbeat falls straight out of the rudiment. The quiet lefts become ghost notes, and the right hand plays a broken hi-hat pattern you’d never come up with on purpose. Add the bass/kick on 1 and 3 and it’s a proper funk groove.
Opens the metronome, drum kit and sticking for this exercise. One at a time, so the click always belongs to what you are playing.
The paradiddle as a fill
A sticking isn’t a fill until it’s linked to the music, so this one comes with a bar of groove in front of it. In the fill bar, the accents move to the toms: the right hand’s accent goes to the floor tom, the left hand’s to the high tom, and everything else stays on the snare.
Same eight strokes you’ve already got, and it suddenly sounds like you’ve been planning the fill all bar. The hard part isn’t the fill — it’s coming back to beat 1 of the groove in time. Loop both bars until that join is clean.
Opens the metronome, drum kit and sticking for this exercise. One at a time, so the click always belongs to what you are playing.
Where to go next
Once the single paradiddle is even, the same idea opens up: start it on the double (R R L R) or put the double in the middle (R L L R). They’re the same eight notes starting in a different place, and each one gives you a different groove and a different fill.
The question is where you actually are on it. Not “can I play a paradiddle”, but at what tempo, in which grouping, with accents, round the kit.
