Hi vxla, and thank you for the YT-link!
The exercises proposed by this man are pretty much the same that I do. However, to this day I haven't become much faster than the speed he demonstrates without sacrificing the cleanliness of my sound. In general, I place more value on sound (or what I take for a good conga sound) than on amazing licks. The double stroke roll, as other snare drum rudiments, has probably been applied to the conga drum since the early 1980s. I overheard that in 1984, but first really experienced it in the 1990s by Giovanni Hidalgo. He played at the Fabrik in Hamburg with Eddie Palmieri. Which means that my idea of fine conga playing was already shaped before the "new school" surfaced. To me, personally, the double stroke technique equals nothing more than an amazing lick. There is so much you can do without it ...
That said, I must admit that I have heard conga players utilize the double stroke roll and other rudiments (paradiddles etc) to a great musical effect. And I do mean musical. The rudiments have without a doubt "invaded" conga drumming technique, and they are about to stay. Anybody who chooses to dispense with them, will need very good reasons to do so. My reason is that they don't really belong to my style - which is still evolving, but anyway, my idea of what I want to hear from myself does not encompass double stroke rolls. Even on the drum set I use them rarely.
In my post at
http://www.mycongaplace.com/forum/eng/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=9940 I wrote about the evidence that even the Prussian military drumming tradition may have prospered without the double stroke roll rudiment.
To reject and belittle this technique only because I couldn't master it accurately myself, would be a pretty poor and shaky reason. If I can't do it, then I am not good enough, period.
I cannot envision a technical status that would enable me to play faster double stroke rolls than I can play single stroke rolls. If I wanted to play a roll and resort to double strokes, I would have to confine myself to a much slower speed than I could achieve with singles. So to me at the moment, the double stroke roll isn't really an asset as far as speed is concerned.
But what has not been mentioned so far, is that double strokes actually
sound different than singles at the same speed. These techniques are not interchangeable! Double stroke rolls for instance have a distinct musical quality. You can hear and feel the difference to single stroke rolls. The decision of which technique you use should not be made on the ground of speed exclusively. And the double stops on macho and hembra in unison that the drummer in the video demonstrates using the up-and-down-stroke technique (which it actually is), would never sound the same as being played with down strokes only. I'm afraid they will eventually sound sloppy, but that's my speculation. I will probably never play them like that. Those double stops often appear as a crescendo fill-in, mostly executed by the entire percussion section together. I'd rather focus on a clean crescendo than try to implement a technique that will likely not do the job.
I kind of lost my interest in the subject, by the way. There have been and still are many conga drummers who claim that double stroke rolls don't belong to the language of their instrument. Tata Güines was one of them, and he was not just anybody. I can't deal with them, but that's my personal affair. Whoever will incorporate them in his/her playing, my ears will tell me whether they are hearing music or - not.
I suggest that young conga players should learn and practice as much as they can, including the doubles. Once mastered, they will be free to decide what they can be used for. I suppose we all agree that music comes before technique. But it is always better to learn more.
Thomas