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The Stick Control Challenge – 30 Minutes To A Stronger Weak Hand

Drumeo | September 21, 2025



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Want to improve your sticking consistency and strengthen your non-dominant hand? Play along with Heather Thomas and work your way through page 1 of one of the most important drumming books: Stick Control by George Lawrence Stone.

Heather practices it per the book’s instructions: repeat each exercise 20 times. The advantages to practicing this way is that you need to stay focused for a long period of time, which gives you an opportunity to relax in an almost meditative way.

Grab your practice pad, ideally in a place where you can stand, and make sure you’re nice and centered in front of it. You’ll be playing for about half an hour, so get comfortable and try to relax!

In this boot camp video, Heather plays it at 152 BPM. If this is too fast for you, take it at a slower tempo on your own until you’re ready.

This page starts with singles, then goes into doubles, paradiddles, inverted paradiddles, single mills (reverse paradiddles), and a variety of other single and double stroke exercises.

Click the link below for the sheet music:
https://www.drumeo.com/beat/stick-control-page-1/

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Comments

This post currently has 47 comments.

  2. @MrRiccy1973

    September 21, 2025 at 6:36 am

    This is brilliant. I use it for other pages in the book too (doubles, triplets etc) and use the playback speed to slow it down or speed it up. Thanks for this video.

  3. @KennyKikuchi

    September 21, 2025 at 6:36 am

    😂 okay, I’m not even ready for 152bpm. However, what you just laid down was understandable.
    I’m going to figure this out but boy am I going to pay.
    I should have done my rooties when I first started. I’ve been faking it all this time. You’re limited when you fake anything. Boy I definitely have my homework cut out for me. Thank you!!! 😜

  16. @MrPhantom95

    September 21, 2025 at 6:36 am

    What i think is hard is knowing what rudiment comes next especially when it’s this fast and it’s almost impossible to memoirize the whole thing when you’re a beginner to this book. You could stop and check but then it ofcourse ruins the flow. How do you guys follow this video?

  22. @MrMateogaguilar

    September 21, 2025 at 6:36 am

    I've been practicing along to this video for 2 full years now, at an avarage of roughly 10 times a week, always trying new approaches to it, and it's still amazes me how deep you can get with it.
    I've heard (or read) somewhere that Stone meant for it to be played as four meassures of the written pattern, followed by 4 more vamping with your weak hand. By vamping I mean playing those 4 bars with just one hand, keeping the note value the same (hope I'm explaining myself here…)
    One of difficulties I have in my playing was to transision smoothly betweem different stickings, and playing it like this gave me the opportunity to switch back and forth four times for each exercise.
    That on it's own was a huge deal. I can now play open handed 16ths (at around 88-88BPM) on the hihats thanks to it.
    Now I'm practising it all left hand lead, in 16ths, following the left hand written notes as accents, and the rest as ghost notes. My singles have never been better since I started doing this!
    I also reccomend playing the kick drum along with left hand, something simple like a paradiddle did throw me off at first but that's the challenge worth taking.
    Well, I hope my rambling ticks someone to try new things with this.
    I'd be delighted to hear from fellow drummers who also use this video to practice.

  34. @AardvaarkTonto

    September 21, 2025 at 6:36 am

    "Fixing your weak hand" is a misnomer. Most of the time the "weak hand" is hitting far too hard. Usually by moving the hinge joints wrist & Elbow. Look at the complete movements of the whole arm, not just the hands and fingers. Are they different? Now try a simple backbeat 4/4 left handed. The right hand sucks now. Terrible at one shot snare beat. Kit drumming (several tools / jobs in both hands) isn't march drumming (same tool/job in each hand).

  37. @linkspanties9808

    September 21, 2025 at 6:36 am

    New drummer, been 4 months. I’ve been doing this everyday for a week now, I started at .75 speed and now I’m at normal. A few mistakes today, but I wonder if gonna actually improve or not ;-; I’m being mindful and my time is on time but idk. What abt ur guys experience ? Tell me about it 🙂

  40. @RagnaRAG62

    September 21, 2025 at 6:36 am

    Watching Drumeo for quite a while now I couldn't help but buying my first ever drum-pad and a pair of sticks – being 62 years of age – DANG! I need to…have to…must learn this!! Purchased the book. With this video I've got an idea what it should look and sound like. Thanks so much for the 30 min in one piece – flawless demonstration ! I think I'm going to begin with 60 bpm or so…

Comments are closed.

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