It took awhile, but I finally stumbled across some old scribbled-out exercises conceivably worth sharing as part of this from the zone series. So far the only person brave enough to submit anything has been Marco from the Netherlands— and he sent me a few more cool things I’ll be sharing soon. So, once again, if you have any hard, weird, scribbled-out relics of your personal woodshed time, I invite you to hastily scan them, or take a digital photo of them, and send them in. That they look like hell is kind of the point, so don’t worry about your penmanship. I can even share them anonymously if you’re embarrassed to ever have conceived of such a thing.
I think this is from about 1987, scribbled in the margin of Vol. III of Gary Chaffee’s Patterns. It’s a thing I call (starting now) Weckl’s paradiddle-diddles, with some variations. There’s probably at least equal justification for calling it Gadd’s or Elvin’s or somebody else’s paradiddle-diddles, but I got it from Dave Weckl. It’s a RLRRLL pattern, beginning with two accents, with the final left hand double played on the bass drum. Some of the variations put the left hand accent before the right, or put the bass drum double right after the accents, but the basic idea is the same:
This came up when I was transcribing a bunch of stuff with Weckl on it— Why Not? by Michel Camilo, Gdansk by Paquito d’Rivera, whatever else I could get my hands on— and it turned up a lot. He really seemed to favor the first two: RLRRBB and especially RLLBBL, which he would play RLLBBR-L, ending with a left hand accent on the snare drum or tom. It occurs here at 0:28 and several times after 0:44: