How to practice Stick Control
Stick Control ships with almost no instructions — three short pages of prose in front of 800+ numbered stickings. But the instructions it does give are precise, and most players skip them. Here is Stone's method, plus the practical decisions he left to you.
Stone's three rules
- Each rhythm, 20 times, without stopping. Stone states it twice, in capitals, and marks it as the point of the whole book. The exercises deliberately have no musical ending so each can loop. The repetition target is the method — one or two passes read the sticking; twenty make it automatic.
- Practice with a metronome at several speeds — his range runs from very slow to very fast, deliberately without a single fixed number. Not one metronome mark appears anywhere in the book. Speed is relative to you.
- Stay relaxed. His advice is to stop the moment tension creeps in. The stickings are, in his word, conditioners — they only condition relaxed muscles.
The two-stage click method
The most useful modern addition to Stone's method is changing what the metronome voices as you learn each exercise:
- Stage 1 — a click on every note. The metronome plays the exercise's actual rhythm (including the triplet groups in later sections), and your hands shadow it. Mistakes are audible instantly.
- Stage 2 — a click on the beat only. The subdivisions now live in your hands; the click just tells you whether the beat still lands. This is where the exercise becomes yours.
Every exercise page on this site has both stages built in — the library lets you try it on any pattern in one tap.
A session that fits in 20–30 minutes
Three exercises a day is the sustainable pace: 20 reps at stage 1, then 20 at stage 2, at two or three tempos, lands each exercise at roughly 6–8 minutes. That's the structure the course automates — bite-size lessons of three exercises, front to back through every section on the site.
What separates practice that sticks
Research on music practice keeps finding the same thing: the players who improve fastest aren't the ones who play the most notes — they're the ones who notice errors and deal with them immediately rather than playing on. A run where the doubles rushed isn't a failed run; it's information. Slow down, fix it, and only then move up.