The drum rudiments are the building blocks for all drum beats and drum fills. Learning how to play all 40 drum rudiments will open your drumming up to huge growth as well as beat and fill possibilities that you never imagined. Learning and applying the drum rudiments to your drumming is one of the most important aspects of playing the drums. Yet learning the drum rudiments is one of the most over-looked drumming principles.t’s imperative you work through the free drum lessons on the single stroke roll and double stroke rolldrum rudiments, before trying to learn the thirteen stroke roll. If you’ve been through other odd-numbered drum roll drum rudiments like the five stroke roll, seven stroke roll, nine stroke roll, and eleven stroke roll drum rudiments, you should find yourself working through this lesson pretty fast.

As you learn how to play this entire collection of double stroke based drum rudiments, like the thirteen stroke roll, the fifteen stroke roll, and the seventeen stroke roll, just to name a few, it gets quite unbearable to count each stroke out loud, especially when playing them as 32nd notes. If you want to count them on your head or even out loud, use 16th notes instead.

Counting a thirteen stroke roll played as 16th notes, like the one on the sheet music below, would sound like so: 1 e and ah 2 e and ah 3 e and ah 4. If the thirteen stroke roll was played as 32nd notes, then you’d have two notes per 16th note. Thus, the counting would be like so: 1 e and ah 2 e and. As you can see, it’s way easier to count this way than to count all the way to thirteen.

After you’ve learned how to play the thirteen stroke roll accurately, it’s time for you to learn how to apply it to the drum set through the drum beats and drum fills below. Let’s take a look at the first one.

In the first pattern, Lionel Duperron plays the thirteen stroke roll as a 16th note pattern between the snare drum and the hi-hat. The bass drum is played on all quarter notes. Once you can play this drum beat pretty accurately, add a metronome to line things up perfectly.