Rolls & marks

A slash is an abbreviation

Writing a roll out stroke by stroke would fill a bar with beamed thirty-seconds and tell you nothing you could read at speed. So the notation abbreviates: write the note you want the roll to last, and draw slashes across its stem to say what to fill it with.

Each slash halves the value being repeated. One slash means eighths. Two means sixteenths. Three means thirty-seconds. That is the whole rule, and it is the same rule every time — a fourth slash would mean sixty-fourths for exactly the same reason.

So the slashes are not an intensity marking and they are not a hand speed. They are an instruction about which subdivision to play, and you get the stroke count by asking how many of that value fit into the note that carries them. If Notes & Rests and Sixteenth Rhythms are solid, you already know how to do that arithmetic; roll notation just asks you to do it before the sticks move.

The note underneath is half the reading

The slashes name a value. They do not say how much of it to play — the note they are drawn on does. Change the note and keep the slashes and the stroke count changes with it.

Two things are being read here, and skipping either one produces a confident wrong answer. The slashes tell you what; the note value tells you how much. Read them in that order, out loud if it helps, before deciding what your hands are going to do.

This is also why a roll figure cannot be recognized as a shape. A quarter note with two slashes and a half note with two slashes look nearly identical on the page and differ by four strokes, which is not a detail.

What the notation does not tell you

Roll notation is specific about the subdivision and silent about almost everything else, and knowing which is which saves a lot of arguing.

• It does not tell you the tempo. Eight strokes in a quarter note is eight strokes whether the quarter lasts half a second or two seconds. The stroke count is written; the speed comes from the tempo marking, and the two are not the same fact.
• It does not always tell you which kind of roll. The same slashes can be read as a measured roll — every stroke counted and placed — or as an open, sustained roll, and at a fast enough tempo the distinction stops being audible. What decides is usually the tempo and the style of the piece, not the marking.
• It does not tell you the sticking. Whether those strokes are singles, doubles or something else is a matter of which roll the part means and what the tempo will allow. The notation counts strokes; it does not assign hands.

None of that makes the notation vague. It is precise about the one thing it claims — how many strokes go inside the written note — and a player who reads that much correctly has a real answer to check the rest against.

The marks that sit above the notes

The other half of this poster is articulation: small marks that leave the rhythm alone and change how each note is played. In percussion writing they sit above the note whichever way the stem points, which is why they are easy to spot and easy to skim past.

Accent

Louder than what is around it. It is a comparison, not a volume — an accent inside a quiet passage is still quiet.

Marcato

Louder and shorter, with weight. Think of it as an accent that also asks for a harder attack and a cleaner stop.

Tenuto

Full length, held to its value. On instruments that ring it means let it; on ones that do not, it means do not clip the note short.

Staccato

Shorter than written, and lifted. It shortens the note; it does not shorten the beat, and the next note still arrives when it was always going to.

Two of those are about volume and two are about length, and mixing the pairs up is the usual mistake. A staccato note is not a quiet note, and an accented note is not a short one unless something else says so.

Accents in particular are where roll notation and articulation meet. A rolled note with an accent is asking for the same stroke count played with a stronger first attack — the slashes still say how many, and the mark still says how.

What to practice, and where it stops

No app in the shop drills roll notation yet, so there is no score to chase on this one. What there is, is Rudiment Builder, which puts a named roll's notation and its stroke-by-stroke sticking on the screen together. Read the slashes, predict the count, then look at the strokes and find out whether you were right. Rudiment names there follow the PAS International Drum Rudiments, so the name on screen is the one in your method book and on your audition list.

The check it cannot give you needs a pad and about a minute. Have someone write a roll figure you have not seen — a note value and a slash count — and write down the stroke count before you touch the sticks. Then play it slowly enough to count what came out. Written first, played second: if you play first, you will find out what you already knew how to play rather than what the page said.

When the stroke arithmetic feels automatic, Time Signatures is the companion piece — it is about which written value counts as the beat, which is the other place the same note value quietly changes what a figure means.