This weekend I was watching some videos on hybrid rudiments to try and learn a few more to add into my bag of so called “tricks”. Video after video I would watch each step to see the technique applied along with the notation and could quickly see how so many people have a fear of these things if they aren’t familiar with rudimental playing. It can be a little intimidating when the “Slowed down” part is still too fast to learn what’s going on. That’s when we move on to the next video and give up on the idea of learning these. I hate that!

This will be my first post of hopefully many more to help break down a new hybrid rudiment each week for you to be able to take baby steps of learning and memorizing them. That’s right! Baby steps!

Cheese

The cheese is not too hard to grasp the concept so I figured this would be a moderate starting point. The cheese is just a flam accent with the diddle placed on the flam.

Step 1: Learn the rudiment flam accent. This is just an eighth note triplet with a grace note on the first note of each triplet.

Step 2: Add the diddle on top of the flam. In this case it would be the right of the opening flam, and the beginning of the second triplet on the first left.

Hope this lesson helps open a door for you to start learning more of these! Once you get this one down and you are ready to move on you can find more hybrid rudiments here.