Kicking off a little series on playing New Orleans-style street beats, here are some grooves by Fred Staehle. These are from Dr. John’s Gumbo, a very famous album of classic New Orleans tunes, recorded by, […]
Year: 2016
EZ Reed method with flams and 16th notes
Another “EZ” Reed method for rock/funk fills, similar to our recent triplet method, this time using pp. 24-27 from Syncopation. I won’t break it down completely, but you can figure it out by looking at the […]
Transcription: Airto — Hot Sand
Why am I not always talking about Airto? I’ve spent fewer hours listening to him than most other drummers at the top of my personal influences list; I never had a period of chasing down […]
Deep Blues
An excellent Mississippi Blues documentary featuring Fat Possum artists R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough (my favorite), along with a good fife and drum group, and others. I had a bad VHS dub of this in […]
Practice loop: Ronnie Foster – Mystic Brew
Please forgive my continued very, very light, almost-not-even-there posting these days. We’ll get back to the usual torrents of stuff very soon. Until that happens, here’s a new practice loop: the vamp from Mystic Brew […]
A good book you should all chase down
Look for the book withthe really goofy cover. I just want to take a moment again to recommend you all try to find a copy of the book Syncopated Rhythms for the Contemporary Drummer by […]
A Funky Primer: double-time feel lesson
Getting back into teaching out of a book I haven’t used in some time: A Funky Primer, by my former college professor Charles Dowd. I felt it was getting a little dated, and I was […]
Uptempo Stone method — 02
Here’s a little companion to our other uptempo method using Stick Contrtol by George L. Stone. This is more of an open system, and you may do it without even getting that deeply into the book […]
Tootie Heath with Monk
On the Jazz At Lincoln Center blog, drummer Tootie Heath tells how a weeklong engagement he played with Thelonious Monk went down: I played a week with Monk and, every night, Nica [Monk’s friend and […]
Why I hate “drum lesson” videos.
The guy making the thing has to guess what parts of it you’re not going to get, and guess how to explain it in a way you’ll understand, meanwhile wasting everyone else’s time who either […]
Very occasional quote of the day: Muhammad Ali
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”
EZ Reed interpretation: triplet lick
Here’s an easy practice method for use with Ted Reed’s Syncopation, developing a triplet lick. What I like about these things is they’re finite. You do the fifteen lines, plus the long exercise, and you’re […]