Snare Open Rolls: Control Exactly Two Contacts per Hand

Count every snare hit aloud right now: "one, two, change." That pair of words — two contacts, then switch — is the whole secret of the open roll. An open roll is a measured double-stroke roll: each hand plays exactly two separate contacts, at sixteenth-note spacing, before the other hand takes over. Get the count right first, and the roll follows.

You need a practice pad, two sticks, and a teacher who can watch the stick come off the head. A metronome at quarter note = 60 is the right starting speed; Tempo and the Metronome walks you through setting it. You do not need speed yet. Speed is what happens when the two contacts per hand are already clean at a slow tempo.

The term "open roll" distinguishes this technique from the "closed" or "buzz" roll. Open means each contact is individually audible and counted. Closed or buzz means the contacts merge into a continuous sound. Both rolls are used in music; this article covers only the open version, because counting individual contacts is how you build the physical control that both techniques eventually share.

What a measured double sounds like — and what it does not

Before touching your sticks, listen to the audio on Two Contacts, Then Change Hands. You will hear sixteen distinct attacks in a row, grouped in pairs. Each pair belongs to one hand. The two contacts inside a pair are equally spaced; the gap between the second contact and the first contact of the next pair is the same size. Everything is even.

Now contrast that with a buzz roll. A buzz roll produces an indefinite, pressing sound: you press the stick lightly against the head and let it rattle. The contact count per stroke is not fixed. You are not aiming to get a buzz here. That is a different technique taught separately.

Two measured contacts on the left; a buzz cluster on the right. The number of contacts in a buzz is not fixed. Measured doubles always have exactly two.

The practical gap between them: an open roll uses two measured contacts per hand at sixteenth-note intervals. A buzz roll uses pressure to produce multiple uncontrolled bounces. They sound different, they feel different, and they are written differently. On a page, the open roll is written as ordinary noteheads; the buzz roll uses a slash-notehead or a tremolo marking.

If you have played open rolls before and are re-reading now because something felt wrong, check your count. The most common confusion is treating the RRLL grouping as "two strokes then a silence," when in fact the two strokes are the same two sixteenth-note spaces as any other pair of adjacent sixteenth notes. Nothing is silent. The stick is moving throughout.

Left: open (measured) roll written as individual noteheads. Right: the panel describes buzz roll notation — a whole note with tremolo slashes (z-notation), where the contact count is indefinite. In most educational settings the open roll is taught first.

The table below summarizes the contrast across the four areas where students most often confuse the two techniques: contact count, spacing, notation, and physical approach.

Open roll versus buzz roll: contact count, spacing, notation, and technique. This article covers only the open roll column.

Let your teacher establish one controlled second rebound

The first contact is simple: your arm swings the stick and it hits the drum. The second contact is where attention is needed. After the first hit, the stick rebounds off the head. You control that rebound with light finger pressure, so it comes back once — just once — before your hand lifts away and the other hand takes over.

This is not a second arm stroke. Your arm is already starting to rise for the handoff. The finger tension is what catches the rebound and times its return to the head.

The initiation starts the motion. The first contact is the natural result. The second contact uses the stick's own energy, controlled by the fingers. Then the hand changes.

Work this way in your first session: pick up your right stick, make one contact, and stop. Feel the stick bounce. Now let it bounce again — that is your second contact. Stop after the second bounce. Say "one — two" aloud as the two contacts happen. Ask your teacher to watch that the second contact arrives without a fresh arm swing. When you can do it cleanly ten times in a row with your right hand, do the same with your left.

Your teacher can place a finger lightly on the stick shaft to feel whether the arm is driving both contacts or only the first. That is the kind of verification the audio on the handout cannot provide.

Two things to notice as you do this exercise. First: the second contact should be slightly quieter than the first — that is normal and expected. The rebound carries less energy than the initial stroke. Do not try to make the second contact equally loud. Trying to force it louder will cause you to apply a second arm stroke, which collapses the timing. Second: the rebound should arrive at exactly the same time interval after the first contact as the first contact arrived after your initiation. That equal interval is the whole point. If you feel a gap, you are pausing between the stroke and the rebound. Relax the hand and let the stick fall back.

Count contacts separately from initiating gestures

Here is where students usually get confused. You initiate eight times per bar — once per pair. But you produce sixteen contacts per bar — twice per pair. A bar of open roll at quarter note = 60 in 4/4 contains sixteen sixteenth-note contacts. Four contacts fill each quarter-note beat. Eight pairs fill the bar.

The Count Both Contacts exercise sheet gives you four contact diagrams to inspect. Two show the correct two-contact model. One shows a missing second contact — only one dot per pair. One shows an extra contact — three dots where two belong. Your job is to identify the defective diagrams before playing, so you know what a correct pair looks like before you try to make one.

A and C follow the two-per-pair rule. B is missing the second contact; D has an extra one. Identify these differences visually before your first attempt on the pad.

Count contacts, not just hands. A student who watches their hands will lose the contact count. A student who counts "one — two — change" aloud keeps it. Say the count for at least the first ten repetitions of each hand alone, then say it for the first ten repetitions of the combined pattern.

There is a useful parallel to reading: just as Sixteenth Notes shows you that the count "1 e and a" names four positions, each equally spaced within a beat, the contact count "one — two" names two positions, equally spaced within a single hand's time slot. Learning to say the count before playing, and then while playing, is the same skill whether you are reading notes or counting rebound contacts. The syllable gives the action a target time.

Connect RRLL

Once each hand can make a clean two-contact pair in isolation, connect four pairs into a bar. The sticking is R R L L R R L L R R L L R R L L — sixteen contacts across one bar of 4/4, with the pattern pair RRLL repeating four times.

Each sixteenth note in Sixteenth Notes subdivides the beat into four equal parts. At quarter = 60, one beat lasts one second, so one sixteenth lasts 250 milliseconds. Your sixteen contacts are spaced 250 ms apart. All sixteen must be equally spaced — not groups of two, then a gap, then two more.

Four beats, sixteen contacts, eight hand pairs. Read across the row: every cell is one contact, equally spaced. The RRLL pair repeats on every beat.

There is also a whole-rest bar after the RRLL line on Two Contacts, Then Change Hands. Use it. After playing sixteen contacts, stop, breathe, and count the silence before you repeat. Rushing back into the pattern before the rest is finished is the most common cause of uneven starts.

Eight pairs across sixteen cells. Each pair stays inside one beat or straddles the beat boundary evenly — never unevenly grouped.

Preserve exact measured spacing

The most common error at this stage is not wrong hands — it is uneven spacing. Two contacts from a single hand tend to cluster together (both notes slightly early) with a gap before the other hand arrives. When that happens, the roll sounds like a shuffle rather than a steady stream.

Here is how to check it. Play sixteen contacts and stop. Listen back in your memory: did the spacing between the second R contact and the first L contact feel the same as the spacing between the two R contacts? It must be. All sixteen gaps are the same size.

Even spacing across all sixteen contacts (top). The text below describes the clustering error: the second contact arrives too soon, bunching the two R or L contacts together and leaving a gap before the hand change. Listen for whether the second contact arrives on exactly its sixteenth-note position.

A useful physical test: set the metronome to sixteenth notes (four clicks per beat). Every contact should land on a click. If you are producing an uneven spacing, some contacts will fall between clicks. The clicks will expose it.

After the sixteenth-note metronome test, switch back to quarter-note clicks and keep the same spacing. You are not adding anything; you are removing the external reference and trusting your internal spacing.

If you find the clustering problem hard to fix by ear, try this: play only the second contact of each pair. Use the metronome at sixteenth-note rate. Play on every other click: beat 1 on click 1, second R on click 2, L on click 3, second L on click 4. That gives each contact its own explicit metronome target. Then add the first contacts back in, letting the second contacts keep their click positions. Rests explains how to count silent positions accurately — the skill you need here is similar: the silent position (your first contact) needs its own internal count even when only the second contact is being heard against the metronome.

The four most common errors at this stage each have a distinct cause and a specific fix.

Four common errors and their corrections. Diagnose which error is present before applying a fix — a clustered-spacing correction and a missing-second-contact correction require different adjustments.

Repeat with the other lead — LLRR

The LLRR bar is the mirror drill — left hand leads every pair instead of right. Practicing LLRR builds the same rebound control on the left hand. This article uses it as a standalone left-lead exercise; practice it separately from RRLL until the spacing is just as clean.

LLRR means: two contacts with the left hand, then two contacts with the right hand, repeating four times across the bar. The hand that initiates changes; everything else stays the same.

The mirror of RRLL: left hand initiates each pair. All sixteen contacts are still evenly spaced at sixteenth-note intervals.

Two Contacts, Then Change Hands prints both bars — RRLL and LLRR — for this reason. Practice each separately until the spacing and the contact count are clean. Then place one bar of RRLL directly before one bar of LLRR without a pause. This transition drill tests whether your timing holds through a lead change. Listen for an extra gap or added contact at the bar line.

A continuous open roll continues RRLL past the bar line — the right hand keeps leading, and the even sixteenth-note stream continues bar after bar without alternating leads. The LLRR drill here trains left-lead independence, which is a prerequisite for continuous rolling, not a second bar in a running roll.

Connecting RRLL to LLRR as a transition drill. The last L of bar 1 and the first L of bar 2 are adjacent sixteenths — no gap at the bar line. This tests timing through the lead change; it is a practice exercise, not the model for a continuous open roll.

Assess the second contact and continuity — no speed target

In a first open-roll lesson, you are not building speed. Speed is the byproduct of clean, even, controlled contacts, practiced slowly enough that the fingers never have to grip or force. Set a target like this: can you produce sixteen contacts with even spacing and exactly two per hand, at quarter = 60, three times in a row without breaking the pattern?

The Count Both Contacts exercise gives your teacher two scored rubric lines. The three criteria are: second contact, evenness, and comfort. Not speed.

Second contact means the rebound arrives cleanly as a separate attack — not a ghost, not an arm stroke, not a buzz. Your teacher can hear it; they can feel it in the stick if they touch the shaft lightly.

Evenness means all sixteen contacts are equally spaced. Not just the initiation gestures — all sixteen contacts. A student who groups the two contacts together and then rests before the next pair has even initiations but uneven contacts.

Comfort means there is no gripping, squeezing, or tension in the wrist or fingers. A tense hand cannot produce a reliable rebound. This criterion is purely teacher-observed; neither the student nor the audio can check it.

Two attempts, three criteria. Assess each criterion on its own before combining them. A clean second contact is the hardest to achieve; evenness and comfort follow.

There is one more thing worth saying about comfort: a relaxed hand is faster than a tense one, over time. Gripping the stick harder does not make the roll more even — it stops the rebound. The controlled second contact happens because you give the stick room to return. Every session you spend at quarter = 60 with a relaxed hand is practice that builds the physical memory for a much faster roll later. Tempo will arrive when the mechanics are automatic.

Use this routine for your first session:

1. Listen to the audio model — sixteen contacts, quarter = 60.
2. Play one hand's double, stop. Count "one — two." Repeat five times.
3. Play four RRLL pairs (one beat). Stop. Were all four contacts spaced evenly?
4. Play one full bar of RRLL. Stop after the whole-rest bar.
5. Repeat step 4 three times in a row.
6. Do the same for LLRR.
7. Connect one bar of RRLL to one bar of LLRR. Check the transition.

Seven steps for the first open-roll session. Do not add speed until all seven steps work cleanly at quarter = 60.

The Two Contacts, Then Change Hands handout gives you the printed notation for steps 4 through 7. The Count Both Contacts exercise gives you visual identification tasks before you play and a teacher rubric after. Use both.

For further sticking context — reading hand letters on a snare line, singles versus doubles, and how the paradiddle connects the two — see Snare Drum Sticking: Keep Time Through Your First Paradiddle. That article covers how to read R and L labels, how to keep eighth-note spacing through hand changes, and how to add printed accents. The open roll sits between those individual strokes and the faster controlled doubles, and it requires all the same reading skills plus finger control.

The open roll has been part of standard percussion training for more than a century. The Percussive Arts Society lists the double stroke open roll as Rudiment #6 in their International Drum Rudiments, defined as a roll in which each hand makes two controlled strokes before alternating. The forty rudiments build on a few core strokes — singles, doubles, buzzes, plus flams and drags. Getting the two-contact pair right at a slow tempo is how you get everything else right later.

Where to go next

Once the two contacts per hand are clean and the spacing is even at quarter = 60, build endurance before raising tempo: can you sustain four RRLL bars in a row, then eight, without spacing drift? When you can, increase the tempo in increments of five — 65, then 70, then 75. The goal is a tempo range at which the contact mechanics are automatic and the rebound requires no conscious correction. Consulting a teacher at each new speed step catches grip or timing errors before they become habits.

Free worksheets for the open roll

• Two Contacts, Then Change Hands — Handout 477: notation for RRLL and LLRR bars, buzz contrast diagram, and audio model.
• Count Both Contacts — Exercise 181: contact-count diagrams, RRLL/LLRR completion cards, and teacher rubric.
• Snare Drum Sticking: Singles, Doubles, and Paradiddle — reading R/L labels and combining single and double strokes.
• Sixteenth Notes — the subdivision count used throughout this technique.
• Tempo and the Metronome — setting and reading the correct practice speed.
• Rests — counting silent positions accurately.

Sources

• International Drum Rudiments — Percussive Arts Society
• 40 Essential Rudiments — Vic Firth / Zildjian
• Drum rudiment — Wikipedia
• Percussive Arts Society International Drum Rudiments (ratified 1984, updated 1994) — PAS official publication
• Mitchell Peters: Fundamental Method for Mallets and Percussion — standard pedagogical framework for rebound control and double-stroke technique