Master Stick Control, twenty clean reps at a time.
Stone's classic gives you one instruction: play each rhythm 20 times without stopping. StickTempo is the tool that instruction deserves — the book's foundation, pp.5–9, as 105 playable tracks, with a metronome that understands each one's rhythm, a cursor that follows the pattern, and a rep counter so you never count in your head.
The grid is the notation: one cell per stroke, grouped by beat. Press start and the metronome clicks every note until the sticking is in your hands — then beat-only, until the time is too. Try №5 →
A metronome that reads the exercise
Mixed measures — two duple beats, then two triplet groups — get clicks that follow the actual subdivision, not a flat pulse. That's the difference between guessing the triplet shift and hearing it.
Tempo that rises when you're ready
Speed trainers ramp on a timer whether or not you kept up. StickTempo's opt-in tempo ladder advances only after runs you rate clean — the progression pattern motor-learning research actually supports. Why →
Progress that stays yours
Stages, completions, and per-exercise tempos live on your device. No account, no sign-up, nothing to install — open a page and practice.
How a practice session works
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Open the next lesson
The course opens on the lesson after the last one you finished — three exercises, in the book's own order. Nothing to configure, no tempo to choose before you can start; the page remembers the tempo you last held for that exercise and offers it back.
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Read the grid, not the staff
Each exercise is drawn as one cell per stroke, grouped by beat, with its sticking letter inside. A cursor walks the grid as the metronome plays, so you always know which stroke you are on — which matters most in the bars where the subdivision changes halfway through the measure and the notation stops looking like the sound.
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Stage one — a click on every note
The metronome plays the exercise's own rhythm rather than a flat pulse. While a sticking is new, that click is a scaffold: you are matching your hands to something you can hear instead of decoding a written rhythm in your head. Rests get a click too, because the click grid is time, not notes.
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Stage two — the pulse only
The same exercise with the click cut back to the beat. This is where the rhythm is actually learned, because everything between the clicks is now yours to place. Expect a pattern that felt solid at stage one to come apart the first time you try it here — that gap is the measurement, not a setback.
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Rate the run and let tempo follow control
Clean, shaky, or lost it. With the tempo ladder switched on, a clean run moves you up about three percent, a shaky one repeats the same tempo, and losing it drops you back — so speed is earned rather than scheduled. The evidence for that →
What's covered
105 exercises from pp.5–9, split into two parts along a boundary the book sets itself.
That is a deliberate fraction of a much longer book. These are the pages a drummer actually returns to for years — the singles, doubles and paradiddles that every later page is assembled from, and the first section that puts three notes where two were. Everything here is the sticking, the exercise number and the page it comes from, written up in our own words; the book itself is worth owning and every exercise page links to it.
Start here if you're new to it
- How to practice Stick Control — the three instructions Stone actually gives, and what a 20–30 minute session built around them looks like.
- What tempo should you start at? — where the familiar 60-to-150 convention comes from, and why the step size matters more than the starting number.
- Page 5, explained — the twenty-four stickings on the most-quoted page in drumming, and the order to meet them in.