PAS #25 · Flam rudiments
Single Flammed Mill
8 main strokes, 2 grace notes over 2 beats. Read it, hear it, and slow it down until it is even.
lRRLR rLLRL
Capital letters are full strokes; small letters are the quiet grace notes of a flam or drag.
What the single flammed mill is
An inverted paradiddle — the diddle moved to the second and third notes — with a flam on the first. The "mill" is the inverted sticking; the flam is what makes it flammed.
How to practice it
- Practice the mill (an inverted paradiddle, RRLR) without the flam until the double at the front is even.
- Then add the flam to the first note only, keeping the grace note low.
- The doubled first note is easy to rush; count four even sixteenths.
Where it leads
The single flammed mill belongs to the flam rudiments family, and it feeds directly into inverted sticking patterns and drum-corps flam passages. Get it even at a slow tempo before you move on — every rudiment built on top of it inherits whatever unevenness you leave here.
Reading the notation above
Both hands play the snare drum, so every notehead sits in the third space of the staff and the sticking letters underneath tell you which hand plays which note. Capital letters are full strokes; small letters are grace notes. The small noteheads with a slash through the stem are the grace notes of the ornament — they are played almost simultaneously with the note that follows, not as separate beats. The marks above the staff are accents: hit those notes harder. Full details in the drum notation guide.
Rudiment data last updated . Every diagram here, in the printable PDF and in the chart image comes from one dataset, so the paper and the screen cannot disagree.