There is a specific kind of wrong that I find much more interesting than the ordinary kind.
Ordinary wrong is audible. A note is late, a roll is uneven, somebody rushes. You hear it, you name it, you fix it.
The other kind sounds fine and is still wrong, and no amount of practicing will find it, because practicing only makes you better at the thing you’re already doing.
The French ra family is full of the second kind.
A ra de 5 and a five-stroke roll have the same number of strokes. They are not the same rudiment. The French count the strokes differently and, more importantly, put the accent somewhere else — and a player who maps one onto the other will produce something that is rhythmically clean, technically defensible, and stylistically inside out.
It does not sound like a mistake. It sounds like a choice. That’s what makes it hard.
The whole family behaves this way. There’s a ra de 4 with no American equivalent at all. There are reversed forms used at fast tempo because they’re more efficient, which is the kind of practical detail that only survives in a tradition where the drumming had a job to do. Tourte’s method catalogues them out to a ra de 11.
Eleven. Try mapping that onto anything in the American forty.
The reason this matters outside of trivia is that the Tompkins etudes are written in this vocabulary, and half the people playing them are reading it in translation without knowing a translation is happening.
The fix isn’t more repetitions. It’s writing the figure out in strict rhythm, slowly, until you can see where the accent actually falls — and then discovering that it isn’t where your hands have been putting it.
Ten minutes of counting beats a month of drilling the wrong thing.
I keep learning that lesson in different costumes.
