The French Rudiments: A Reference
If you are working through Joseph Tompkins’ Nine French-American Rudimental Solos and something sounds wrong even when you play every note correctly, this page is why.
The etudes are written in a vocabulary most American percussionists have never been taught. Six of the figures below have no American equivalent at all. Several more share a name with an American rudiment and are not the same thing.
Why the two systems don’t line up
Before radio, a drum was how you moved several thousand people who could not see each other. Which creates an obvious problem: the enemy has ears too.
So rudiments were kept deliberately different between armies. Not as a quirk of national style — as encryption. Your figures identified you to your own side and meant nothing to theirs, and the more prestigious the regiment, the more elaborate its vocabulary became. The rudiments were extracted afterward from actual compositions that had a job to do. The batteries came first.
That is the whole explanation for why a ra de 5 is not a five-stroke roll.
The vocabulary
| French | American | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Frisé coup simple | Single stroke roll | Older name bâton rond. Sung “tapatapa.” |
| Roulement | Double stroke roll | Formerly bâton brisé; “papa-maman” when detached. |
| Bâton mêlé | — none — | “Mixed sticks”: one hand single, the other double. Disliked in French military drumming for being asymmetric. |
| Fla | Flam | |
| Flafla fla inversé | Inverted flam | Used at fast tempo in the Pas accéléré. |
| Coup de charge | — none — | The charge stroke. The inverse of a flam: the accent lands first, the soft stroke follows it. |
| Coup anglais l’anglaise | ≈ Inverted flam tap | A flam preceded by a single stroke. Named for its French inventor. |
| Bâtard | ≈ Flam tap | Used in the retreat marches of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. |
| Ra de 3 tra | Drag / ruff | Called “ruff” in the old NARD list. |
| Ra de 4 | — none — | No American rudiment corresponds. |
| Ra de 5 | ≈ 5-stroke roll | The counting conventions do not line up. |
| Ra de 5 détaillé | Linked 5-stroke roll | In NARD, absent from the PAS 40. |
| Ra de 7, 9, 11 | partly | Tourte catalogues the family out to a ra de 11. |
| Frisé sauté | Jumped single stroke roll | |
| Raté sauté patatra | ≈ Lesson 25 (NARD) | “Patatra” entered common French for a fall. |
| Flagada | — none — | “Flagada” entered common French for fatigue. Used in the Marche des éclopés. |
| Patafla | Flam accent | Used in the Batterie d’Austerlitz, 1805. |
| Pataflafla | Pataflafla | French name adopted whole. Absent from NARD, present in PAS. |
| Coup coulé | Slipped stroke | A double stroke into a charge stroke. |
| Moulin | Single paradiddle | “Mill.” |
| Volant | Double paradiddle | “Wheel.” |
| Rigodon | ≈ Single drag tap | From the ternary French dance. Played for the Réveil au bivouac. |
| Coup de la Diane | Double drag tap | “Diana stroke.” The traditional French camp wake-up. |
The figures
Fifteen of them, engraved from the source phrasings rather than redrawn from memory. One bar each, sixteenth grid, sticking under the notes, accents where the sources put them. The remaining seven — the flams and the odd ones — are held back until the stickings are confirmed against the books, because a wrong sticking published as a reference is worse than a missing one.
Engraved for this page · free to print · andyblissmusic.com
Four things that trip up American players
The coup de charge is not a flam. In a flam the quiet grace note comes first and the accent lands after it. In a charge stroke the accent lands first and the soft stroke follows, immediately. The French sing it “ta-la.” A flam is “ga-DA.” Say both out loud and you will hear that they are not the same gesture.
The ra family counts differently. French counts the strokes of a roll differently and puts the accent in a different place. A player who maps ra de 5 onto a five-stroke roll produces something rhythmically clean and stylistically inside out — a mistake that sounds like a choice, which is what makes it hard to catch.
Drill the détaillé form first. The French tradition teaches every rudiment opened out in strict rhythm before closing it toward the performance figure. You are not interpreting a symbol; you are playing a rhythm you can count.
Some of these are pieces, not exercises. The Batterie d’Austerlitz was composed to order the day after the battle in 1805, and only regiments that fought there were permitted to play it.
The books
Robert Tourte, Méthode de tambour et caisse claire d’orchestre (1946). The official method of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, and the source nearly every French rudiment nomenclature traces back to. It also contains the Batteries du Premier Empire.
Guy Lefèvre, Étude Progressive de la Technique — Caisse Claire, Vols. 1–2 (1986–87). Concert snare technique studies, still in print from Alphonse Leduc. Akira Robles’ 2020 dissertation identifies these as a direct source for Tompkins’ French-American works — which makes this the most useful book on the list if you are working on the etudes.
Guy Lefèvre, Le Tambour, Technique Supérieure (1987). The rudimental field-drum companion. Note the distinction: caisse claire is concert snare, tambour is the rudimental field drum.
Robert Goute, Le Tambour d’Ordonnance, Vols. 1–2 (1981–82).
Drill sheets
I have been engraving one-page drill sheets for each of these — the figure written out in the détaillé form, a tempo ladder, and somewhere to log the day you recorded yourself playing it. They’ll be free.
I’m writing my way through the tradition here one rudiment at a time. If you want them when they land, the Saturday note is where I’ll say so.
On sources. The nomenclature above is compiled from Tourte via Marc de Douvan’s French rudiment catalogue, cross-checked against Akira Robles’ 2020 analysis of Tompkins’ French-American works. Corrections are welcome and will be credited.
