Two minutes of focused warm-ups before a practice session does more for your playing than ten minutes of cold attempts. The exercises below are a quick vocabulary tour: singles, doubles, a sticking switch, paradiddles, triplets, and a density swell. Each one wakes up a different motor pattern.
Run them in order, all at the same tempo you can play cleanly today — slow if you're tight, faster as the hands loosen. Volume should be even between hands; stick heights should match. If anything sounds rough, drop the BPM and play it twice before moving on.
The Swell as a Daily Thermometer
Exercise 6 doubles as a diagnostic. The density swell climbs from quarters to 16ths and back; the moment the 16ths turn rough is today's clean ceiling, and it moves day to day. Note the tempo where it happened. Practicing at or just below that ceiling builds speed; practicing far above it builds tension and bad habits with equal efficiency.
Resist the urge to warm up at performance tempo. Cold hands at full speed recruit the forearms, and forearm tension is the thing a warm-up exists to prevent. Start embarrassingly slow, listen for evenness, and let the tempo rise on its own — most days it takes about two minutes.
Exercises
Sticking: R L R L R L R L. The simplest warm-up — alternation, even volume, matched stick heights. Don't rush; the point is to feel both hands waking up to the same height and the same loudness.
Sticking: R R L L R R L L. Wrist motion warm-up. Both notes of each pair should be equal volume — the second note shouldn't die. If it does, slow the bpm until they match, then build back up.
Sticking: R L R L · R R L L. First half is singles, second half is doubles. Switching mid-bar reveals where your hands lock up — if you stumble at the transition, that's the spot to drill.
Sticking: R L R R · L R L L, twice per bar. The paradiddle mixes singles and doubles in one phrase — wakes up the coordination between the two hand types in the same gesture. Accents (the > marks) naturally fall on counts 1, 2, 3, 4.
Sticking: R L R · L R L · R L R · L R L — three notes per beat, lead hand alternating each group. Triplet feel wakes up separately from straight 8ths; this gets it under your hands before you need it inside a groove.
Single-stroke sticking throughout: R · L R · L R L R · L. Density swells then settles: quarter → 8ths → 16ths → quarter. Use this as the last warm-up to find today's clean ceiling — if the 16ths on beat 3 sound rough, drop the BPM and run the routine again.