The Flam is a funky little rudiment that can be placed anywhere in your playing. The beauty of this rudiment is that it can be added to any other rudiment you can imagine.
The accent note is played with one hand and the grace note is played with the other. The key to playing the Flam correctly is to ensure that the two notes are as close to each other as possible without falling at the same time. The grace note always falls before the accent note. To make sure the Flam is executed correctly both hands must be placed at the correct heights. The accent note hand should be about 12 inches from the drum while the grace note should be about 1 inch from the drum.
Simply work on the Right hand Flam first and then move to the Left hand Flam. Remember to play both the accent and grace notes as closely to each other as possible without them falling together.
The opposite applies as well; if the two notes are too far apart then it will sound like two individual notes and not a Flam. This is exactly the same as the first exercises except written in eighth notes.
The idea is to increase the speed you are able to execute alternating Flams at. You will find it difficult to play these at fast tempos as the hands have to do a lot of complicated movement.
This exercise is a way of working on one Flam hand at a time. The grace note hand feels like its simply playing a line of notes while the accent hand performs the Flam when required, in this case, every two notes. Think of this rudiment as doubles with a Flam added to the front of each double. This rudiment is an effective and easy way of executing Flams every two notes. As the name suggests this is the Flam Tap but inverted. Nothing more than a pair of hits, the second a little bit louder than the first, so close together as to almost sound like a single stroke, the flam is easy to play, easy to program, and makes an effective tool for accenting and adding emphasis.
Perhaps the most famous example of the flam in a rock drumming context is the intro to Guns N' Roses' Paradise City, in which drummer Steven Adler nails the backbeat to the floor with both hands. At first, the flam is used simply to lay down beats 2 and 4, but they continue to crop up throughout the track within fills - and here we're going to look at just that: how flams can be used to make drum fills more interesting and dynamic.
Flams are mostly played on the snare drum. The key to realistically emulating them is making sure the hits don't sound identical - ie, avoiding the machine gun effect from using a sampled sound source with no 'round-robin' multisampling. If your drum kit ROMpler suffers from this, find a secondary snare sound similar in tone and pitch to the main one, and use that for the first hit of the flam. Beyond that, it's just a matter of getting your positioning and velocities right, and making sure you don't double your flams up with anything else that would require the drummer's hands.
For more drum programming tutorials, check out Computer Music magazine's monthly Dr Beat column. Once you feel you can play the flam with consistency and quality, you can move on to learning how to apply it to drum fills and drum beats. The first flam drum beat is a rendition of the basic 8th note rock drum beat. Start by playing a basic 8th note rock beat - bass drum on counts 1 and 3, hi-hat on all 8th notes, and the snare drum on counts 2 and 4.
After you can play this comfortably, instead of playing a unison figure between the hi-hat and snare on counts 2 and 4, play a right hand flam on the snare drum. Flam drum beat 2 takes the use of flams a bit further by adding 8th note flams to the mix. For an added challenge, try playing the 8th note flams as hand-to-hand flams. Playing loud grace and primary strokes is something very common in rock and funk music, for instance. On the next drum fills, Lionel gives great use to this type of flam for spicing up the patterns.
Exercise 3 is the first flam drum fill. Until count 4, the drum fill is played as a 16th note single stroke roll drum fill going down the toms. On count 4 there is a left hand flam played on the snare drum. Start working on this drum pattern slowly at first.
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