Year: 2012
Drum chart: Along Comes Mary by Cal Tjader
Pillaging the archives while I’m working on tour/book-related junk, I turned up another Cal Tjader drum chart, written by me a couple of years ago. I’ll try to do more of these in the future- […]
Todd’s Methods: Stick Control in 5
So much for writing nothing. I’ve been doing a lot of practicing in 5/4 lately- I’ve always quite sucked at it, frankly- and finally getting it together for real has been a curious process. Very […]
DBMITW and news
We’ll be on light posting for the next couple of days while I do a bunch of work on publicity for my new record of the music of Ornette Coleman, Little Played Little Bird (which […]
The club scene
Here’s a great piece on understanding the, well, near-dead state of live music in clubs (professionally, anyway), and what musicians can begin to do about the situation, by LA pianist Dave Goldberg. It opens: AS […]
All the grooves from Maggot Brain
Many of these are highly variable, so it may be presumptuous to declare that I’m giving you all the grooves from this record, but that’s the name of the series… I guess that’s what I […]
DBMITW: Gadd with Chick
I’m working on putting last year’s transcriptions into book form today- which, thanks to the miracle of online publishing, should be available for you to purchase shortly. So you’ll just have to enjoy these two […]
Other people say good things
It’s a slow writing day for me, but there are lots of good things afoot at our brother drummer blogs right now: @ Trap’d: Inspired by Art Taylor, Ted Warren outlines some easy things you […]
Paradiddle-diddle method for uptempo jazz
This is something I developed for both for getting some relief while playing fast tempos, and for doing a modern feel without getting your cymbal pattern lost in the weeds. The seed of the idea […]
Todd’s paradiddle-diddle interpretation
This is the first practice method for the pages of syncopation exercises I posted the other day. Today I’ll give it to you just for the hands only, then later I’ll show you how I […]
Dave Tough’s Advanced Paradiddle Exercises
Here’s an out-of-print classic, scanned and made available for download thanks to Denver drummer Todd Reid. God knows if it will ever be made commercially available again, or if anyone even owns the copyright, so […]
Syncopation exercises with dotted quarter notes
This is one of many pages of original Syncopation variants I’ve written up, in this case restricted to combinations of dotted quarter notes, quarter notes, and single 8th notes. I’ve devised a few interpretive methods […]