A few cymbals for sale. They’re all nice, and I hate to part with them, but I’ve just got too many medium-heavy 20″ rides around, and for whatever reason these haven’t found their way into […]
Year: 2017
New Year’s Skype lesson offer
Hey, it just occurred to me: I should have more Skype students than I do. I have plenty of followers, plenty of daily visitors, plenty of book-purchasers, and a fair number of donors at fund […]
Page o’ coordination: Elvin’s Afro-waltz – starting off the 1
Hearkening back to one of the very first pages o’…, in which we worked on developing an Elvin Jones-style waltz, the way he played it on John Coltrane’s Your Lady. It’s an interesting groove, with […]
Odd meter Harr: flamcues in 5/8
Another Haskell Harr etude transcribed into 5/8, this time one of the flamacue studies on p. 79 of book 2— I only use book 2: As in the original, the number 5 or 7 next […]
Page o’ coordination: triplet pattern with cymbal variations – 01
A slight variation on our usual page o’ coordination thing; here we’re doing a set triplet pattern on the snare drum and bass drum, along with various cymbal parts— some are standard rhythms, and some […]
Practice loop: Max in 5
In honor of what would be Max Roach’s 92nd birthday, here’s a practice loop sampled from As Long As You’re Living, from his album Quiet As It’s Kept. The tune is a blues in 5/4, […]
Gadd on time
Another item from Rick Mattingly’s 1983 Modern Drummer interview with Steve Gadd. It’s encouraging that a lot of the very common fuzzy talk about time makes no more sense to the greatest studio drummer in […]
Groove o’ the day: Harvey Mason – Slop Jar Blues
Here are some fairly basic funk grooves, which I’m really only posting as an excuse to get you to listen to this track, and the way the drummer plays it. The tune is Slop Jar […]
Odd meter Harr: flamadiddle study in 5/8
I’ve said before, I practice out of Haskell Harr’s Drum Method a lot. It’s the stodgiest traditional rudimental snare drum book available this side of the Moeller book, but it uses accurate modern notation— many […]
Stick Control in odd meters – 02
Continuing from the previous post on adapting roll exercises in Stick Control to odd meters— see that post for an explanation; I’ll just give examples of a few more possibilities. Like this rather advanced way […]
Ghost notes developer
Ghost notes are currently an extremely hot topic in internet drumming land— it seems funny that there would be so much hoopla about an embellishment, but whatever. I use them all the time in my […]
Very occasional quote of the day: Steve Gadd on reading
“Reading improves just from doing it. It wasn’t easy for me, but thanks to the encouragement of my teacher, John Beck, I stuck with it and it has been very useful. The more you do […]