In honor of the passing of the guitarist John Abercrombie— along with Pat Metheny, John Scofield, and Bill Frisell, one of the most important guitarists of the last ~45 years— here’s Jack Dejohnette’s playing on […]
Year: 2017
Meter-within-meter: 5/8 in 4/4 rock – 01
This is something inspired by Joey Baron’s playing on Bill Frisell’s Child At Heart— I always come back to the same few things, and that’s a particularly fertile, mainly simple, piece of drumming. Some of […]
Figure Control – 6/4 – 02
Another page of Funk Control type exercises for use with my Stereolab/Free Design practice loop. We’re calling this portion of the series Figure Control since it’s not really funk, and we’re basing the exercises on a […]
Groove o’ the day: Milton Nascimento – Tudo Que Você Podia Ser
My apologies for the lack of new posts. I’m putting together a new show of my paintings— first one in 15 years— and that has been occupying most of my spare time of late. Here’s […]
Groove o’ the day: Billy Cobham – The Dancer
Today we have a funk samba groove from Billy Cobham, playing The Dancer on Stanley Clarke’s School Days— one of the biggest fusion albums of the 70s. We’re actually throwing a bone to the open-handed […]
When they say they have drums
All right dude I told ya we had a sweet drum set for you, here you go They don’t have drums. You’re going to get burned. Always. Pardon me— I just had a couple of […]
Groove o’ the day: Betty Davis – Shut Off The Light
Fairly funky thing here… fairly compared to nuclear war, maybe… the opening groove from Shut Off The Light from Betty Davis’s Nasty Gal album. Drums are variously credited as being Nicky Neal, Semmie Neal Jr., […]
EZ “harmonic” independence
Fairly EZ. EZ compared to the thing it’s based on. This is something that came out of practicing the harmonic independence section of 4-Way Coordination by Dahlgren & Fine. Looking at that book makes you […]
FIGURE CONTROL: 6/4 – Free Design riff
Stretching the concept of my Funk Control series a little bit. Here we’re just doing some basic orchestrations with a rhythmic figure, the vamp in 6/4 from Stereolab’s The Free Design, which I posted before […]
Todd’s funk shuffle drill
This is a loose collection of stuff with which you can drill a rather busy, modern funk shuffle feel or triplet funk feel, a la Lopsy Lu or The Brecker Brothers’ Inside Out: OK, those […]
The hard way
Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of talk about doing things the hardest way possible— among drumming students there’s a great fear of “crutches” and “cheating.” The path of least resistance offends people’s protestant work […]
Displacing a groove – 16th notes – 02
Part 2 of the previous displacement thing. This is the kind of thing that’s so obvious I don’t like to put it on the site, but it’s an intermediate step to the next thing, and […]