Very sorry that the drummer Steve Berrios, who played a lot of great music, passed away this week. On this recording he plays trumpet, as well as drums: More after the break: Playing drumset: On […]
Year: 2013
From the zone: some diddle licks
Easing back into blogging after being away for a few days, here’s something from the notebook of New York-based drummer Chris Stromquist: Visit Chris at his regular site and his Bandcamp site. Again, I encourage […]
Gone camping
Back to regular posting in a moment… Waldo Lake, high in the Oregon Cascades. My friend did the Leonardo Di Caprio pose at my behest… that’s my fault…
Page o’ coordination: metric modulation — 1/3
Or rather superimposed metric modulation, per Vinnie Colaiuta’s term, which few people use, but is actually correct. This is the first of three pages ‘o… developing a swing feel in 2 within a measure of […]
Exercises for developing a common Reed interpretation
Following up on the Key to right hand accented triplets post, here is a set of exercises for getting my recommended stickings together: Get the pdf
Self-improvement through neurosis
Normally I don’t bother editorializing about cartoons, but this thing has gotten so ubiquitous on the music ed-related Internet, I thought I’d say something about it. Let’s get this out of the way up front: […]
Key to right hand accented triplets using Syncopation
There’s a very common interpretation used with Ted Reed’s Syncopation: the right hand plays the melody line, swinging the 8th notes, and the left hand fills out the triplets— hopefully everyone has heard of that […]
How to play Pent Up House
Or, how to play it the way it was played originally. What we’ll do in this series is look at the definitive recorded versions of some commonly played jazz tunes, and nail down all the […]
VOQOTD: Q & A with Jim Black
Are you always in control? >That’s a great question:))) — Interview question by Sergio, from Black’s site. OK, a little more: “[D]rums and guitar suffer from serious technical sportsperson-like abuse, which can be fun, of […]
DBMITW: magnum opus
Resisting the urge to post Le Tigre’s Bang Bang in this space today. Instead: McCoy Tyner’s Passion Dance, from the Real McCoy album, came on KMHD radio yesterday on my way to a lesson (you […]
Page of Mozambique
So here’s what we were setting up with that last thing— a page of Mozambique for the drum set: Work up each pattern individually until it feels good, and then combine parts as you see […]
Conga to Mozambique
Let me say up front that I’m always a little paranoid about venturing into Afro-Cuban music on the blog— I don’t have a lot of field experience playing it with knowledgeable people, and have had […]