Today I’m going to demonstrate a very practical approach to funk sticking using a right hand lead. This same concept can be applied to any style of music.



Note: This article is written from a perspective of a right-handed drummer. If you play left-handed,just switch the stickings around and lead with your left hand.



There is much talk today in drumming circles concerning the idea of ambidextrous, or open-handed playing on the drum-set. While I’m not questioning the value of that type of practice for very advanced players, I really don’t feel it’s the most practical way for most drummers to become proficient on the drum-set.



Your first goal should be to be able to groove, and express yourself as effortlessly as possible on the drums. It is much easier to reach this goal by using a right hand lead, than switching back and forth between right and left hand lead. This is partly because of muscle memory. It’s also because biologically, your right arm and right foot are connected in your brain. This makes it easy to hit the bass drum in unison with the right hand. By contrast, it’s much more difficult to hit the left hand in unison with the bass drum. So quite simply, playing with a right handed lead is the shortest path to learning to play the drums really well.





Right Hand Lead Funk Sticking Concept

The concept is very simple. We’re going to start with a typical syncopated sixteenth pattern. This could be a figure that the horns are playing. It could be a bass or guitar groove. It could also be a solo idea.

The easiest way to play this figure on the drum-set is to play it with your right hand. Your left hand fills in all the sixteenth notes in between the right hand notes on the snare drum with single and double strokes. Keep the left hand notes softer, possibly ghosted. You want the right hand “melody” to really come out. The right hand is playing the lead line, and the left hand is the icing on the cake.

You can voice the right hand anywhere you choose around the drums.

Precede example with one measure of time.

Example #1: Right hand moving around the toms.

Example #2: Adding hi-hat “barks” (accents). Note that your right hand is playing in unison with the bass drum, making it very easy to execute the figure.

Sticking Exceptions

What about situations where this sticking doesn’t really work very well? Here’s an example of such a situation.

We have eighth rests occurring on the and of 1 and beginning of 2. If the tempo is slow. we can just play 4 sixteenths in a row on the snare drum. If it’s fast, this isn’t going to work.

The solution is to either just leave space during one of the rests, or just alter the sticking for 2 sixteenths, so that the whole thing turns around again to a right hand lead.

Example: In this example, I just added a RL sticking on the first 8th note occurring on beat two. This avoids having to play 4 sixteenth notes in a row and keeps our right hand lead sticking format intact.

Mastering The Sticking Concept

The next step is to take other one measure patterns, and practice voicing them on the drum-set in the same manner. Always precede each with 1-4 bars of a funk groove so that you can work them into your playing.

Eventually your ear and coordination will develop so that you no longer have to practice specific one measure examples. You will be able to improvise at will, by simply moving your right hand around the drum-set while playing various syncopated patterns.

Not only is this sticking method easier than always relying on RLRL patterns around the set, it will also give you a completely different sound and feel-something much more subtle and sophisticated.

As mentioned earlier, this concept can also be applied to other styles of music. In the next article I’ll show how to apply this concept to triplets.