To a certain extent, stickings are a drummer’s vocabulary, somewhat equivalent to the scales of melodic instruments. Different stickings result in different sounds and different rhythms, just as different notes result in different melodies and harmonies. And just as different melodies can be extracted from one scale, different sounds and rhythms can be produced using a single sticking.
I'm rather fond of paradiddles, a sticking we all know. They’re very useful, and they provide a good example for illustration. Take the triple paradiddle: R L R L R L R R / L R L R L R L L. A simple way to vary this is to accent some of the strokes:
Or you could change the voicing by playing one hand on the hi-hat or bell of a cymbal, and the other on the snare to produce a linear pattern: There's a lot more that you can do with a simple paradiddle, and then there are the various permutations. What this gives us is many options for a single sticking pattern.
So, if one sticking pattern is so amazingly useful, why bother to learn more? Well the key word here is ‘learn’. There are some stickings that we want to commit to memory as solidly as we can. These are the workhorse stickings. They're the sounds and patterns we rely on day to day. Then there are stickings that are meant only as exercises. It would be difficult to master all of the stickings in, for example, Joe Morello's “Master Studies” book. These types of stickings are meant to get your hands moving, to develop control and endurance, and also to help defeat some of the habits we might have developed. The objective is not to commit to memory more stickings, but to free the hands to go beyond mere learned patterns. They are also meant to motivate us to practice and to keep discovering.
In between are the sticking exercises that turn out to be really useful. The “King Kong” rhythm is a good example: RLRR LRRL. It's a good sticking exercise, but a few clever wags (e.g. David Garibaldi, Dave Weckl, Phil Collins, et al.) decided to play the R strokes on the cymbal and add some syncopated bass drum shots.
At the other end of the scale, Kirk Covington, drummer for Tribal Tech and Volto, claims he only has two sticking techniques: single strokes and double strokes, which is quite something given what he can do on the drums. Kirk apparently doesn’t put much stock in learning a lot of sticking patterns but he knows what works for him.
Photo Credit: Lyudmyla Raynard