Not Chicken and a Roll is a twist on the classic Higga-digga-burr, also called Chicken and a Roll in some circles (like... "check into a roll"... Does joke get you?). The basis of those exercises is to build larger motions with a check pattern and then add the smaller motions with the diddles. This exercise throws that idea out the window, instead relating eighth-note timing to 4:3-tuplet rolls. It's trippy... but I like trippy.
Ratama-Who?
Ratama-Who? juxtaposes different accent patterns of paradiddle-diddles with their ratamacue analogues. Have fun with it!
Beef Shawarma
Beef Shawarma works on triplet rolls at different dynamics and with different playing zones. Maintaining roll quality across the range of heights and around the drum head is crucial to playing snare drum in an indoor drumline, where discrepancies in sound quality at different heights, as well as discrepancies in precise bead placement, can dramatically impact the quality of the music.
A useful variation would be to replace the "edge" position with the "guts" position (2 o'clock on the drum head, over the snare bed) and perform the exercise that way. Matching sound quality between hands is a little more challenging at the "guts" position and while transitioning to it, since the left bead has to move slightly in front of the right in order to match distance from the rim.
If you really want to push your versatility, another variation is to reverse the dynamics (i.e., piano becomes forte, crescendo becomes decrescendo, etc.), so you end up doing weird things like crescendoing towards the edge, which creates an interesting sonic effect, in addition to forcing you to match roll quality at the high dynamic with very little snare response to support the sound and hide discrepancies in timing.
Grace Note Control
Grace Note Control requires that the lead hand in a series of same-handed flams crescendo or decrescendo, while the grace-note hand remain steady. This is a very challenging exercise that requires a great deal of control over grace note placement.
Not Hugadigs
Not Hugadigs works on three-beat series that are not hugadigs (the one-handed breakdown of a flam-tap): i.e., the strict accent-to-tap (Rrr) and tap-to-accent (rrR) figures that are the breakdowns of pataflaflas, inverted flam taps, and accented single-stroke figures.
Open Roll Builder
This Open Roll Builder is a triplet-roll analogue to the stock "Diddle Tap" exercise; this one works on the eighth-note-based breakdowns of an open triplet roll, instead of a duple roll.
Shifting Gears
Shifting Gears works the metric transition between 16th-note and triplet diddle figures. The tendency will be to either be fast or tight going into the triplet figures, and to be slow or wide going into the 16th-note figures. Such metric transitions are worth practising, not because they appear often, but because they demand a mastery of fulcrum pressure, wrist control, and diddle placement that will make more common diddle contexts (e.g. cold attacks, tap-rolls) more easy to reliably execute.
