Next Level Beats completionism

Finger Drumming Lessons / Courses / Practice
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So I just started the Next Level Beats course—the one with 10 non-alternating grooves (plus variations). Looking ahead, I watched Robert’s YouTube video posted in the final lesson, What I’ve been practicing all year, where he breaks down the handwork exercises that build motor fluidity (and I infer led to the lessons in QFG). That sent me down a fun rabbit hole about how many left/right patterns actually exist for a standard 4-bar phrase of 16th notes.

Short version: if you write a 4-bar (4/4) line as 16 slots of L/R and you forbid three hits in a row with the same hand (realistic at tempo), as Robert suggested in his YouTube video, then—treating rotations as the same pattern—there are exactly 142 unique stickings. (Same groove, different starting point = same pattern.)

That got me thinking:

  • Why these 10 in the course? (My guess: they’re musical “anchors”—low-period, memorable, orchestrate well, or are related to specific music genres.)

  • Is there any value in practicing more than those 10? I don’t want to go full-on John-Coltrane-Sheets-of-Sound :sweat_smile:, but I could imagine grabbing 1–2 new patterns a day. Over a year, you’d touch all 142 and build a scary amount of mental flexibility and motor control, assuming one stuck with it.

  • Another, likely related question: Robert, what did you do for that year you described in the YouTube video?

Btw, if anyone’s nerdy like me, this turned into a cute combinatorics puzzle (Burnside’s Lemma applied to so-called “necklaces”) with a practical application.

Cheers and thanks :waving_hand: ,
David

PS I can post those 142 sequences if of interest to anyone.

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You can literally practice all combinations you can think of. What I did exactly during the year I do not remember. I mostly just came up with nice sounding patterns and play them on the spot (so in my case no completionism or having a full list of all possibilities, but it depends on what motivates you if you should or should not go down that path).

My 10 examples are just to illustrate a point. Showing you what is possible and how to effectively practice it. After that it is up to you where you take things. The course also challenges you to come up with your own variations which would be a good first step.

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