What’s it even called? Guitar Center Lessons Drums Book 1? UPDATE: I had a student’s parent try to purchase this book, and it turns out it’s not for sale without purchasing lessons from them. Too […]
Year: 2017
Billy Higgins trading 4s
This is from the same tune as the recent post Comping The Billy Way— Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, with Hank Jones and Ray Drummond, from the album The Essence. Here Higgins is […]
Rock in 5/8 – 01
5/8 and 5/4 are good meters to practice to if you want to improve your concentration, and disrupt playing habits. Five-note patterns in general, too. For many years my playing was extremely 3 oriented; whatever […]
5/8 accents in a triplet feel
I’ve worked on triplets and */8 feels a lot in my 35+ years playing the drums, and played a lot of music in the style, and still there’s a certain type of shuffle or 12/8 […]
Stone on drumset: sixtuplet exercise
We’re doing quite a bit with the book Stick Control on the drumset these days. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the book— mainly that it’s based on abstract sequences of […]
Comping the Billy way
Here’s a fresh lesson on simplicity in comping in jazz— file this along with the post about the “Kenny” note from a few years ago. I’ve transcribed some ideas from Billy Higgins’s playing on Things […]
Practice loop: Wilson Pickett – Mojo Mama
By the way, all of yesterday’s ranting and raving about people’s drum covers doesn’t apply to my sampled practice loops, which are lovely, highly recommended, and serve a totally different function. We’re not aiming for […]
A rant: limits of playalong tracks
You playing along with a backing track. So, I watch the YouTube videos of drummers playing along with their playalong tracks, and sounding pretty OK, and I think you know, I probably wouldn’t sound any better […]
Page o’ coordination: Latin in 3 – 05
This is a fairly subtle variation on this Afro 6 feel, which we’ve covered pretty fully in the past few years, and possibly one of the easier entries in the series. I suppose you could […]
Groove o’ the day: Jimmy Smith / Midnight Special
In about 1991 I lived in Eugene, Oregon, and every once in awhile KLCC 87.9 would play something that would send you immediately to Cat’s Meow (the jazz record store that survived for 30 years […]
Stick Control drumset exercise – RLRR-LRLL
Part 3 of this series, where the need to write out the exercises becomes perhaps more apparent. We’re playing a basic drumset orchestration of exercises from the first page of Stick Control by George L. […]