First, a service announcement: I’m heading to Germany in a couple of days, so posting will be rather light. I’ll be visiting some teachers and drummers in Berlin and Dresden, and showing them some Cymbal […]
Year: 2018
Page o’ coordination: basic jazz waltz – 02
Another page of basic jazz waltz materials, with a dotted-quarter note rhythm on the bass drum, which gives your waltz a more rolling feel. As opposed to the traditional, rather hokey boom-tap-tap feel. Play the […]
VOQOTD: Jon Christensen on technique
From Jon Christensen’s Modern Drummer feature in the early 80s: MD: What makes a drummer interesting to you? What do you look for? JC: Having watched a lot of drummers over the years, you can […]
Open ratamacues – 01
Anyone know what the story is with ratamacues? I don’t get it. Why a ruff on a 16th note triplet? As a fundamental sticking pattern they’re ungainly, and as musical vocabulary they’re ill-defined, tensionless blobs […]
Hell of notes
I want to talk about my own playing a little bit. Here’s an item from a little free-jazz show with Portland musicians Ryan Meagher and Noah Simpson a couple of nights ago: What is going […]
Mel Lewis on rub-a-dub
Loren Schoenberg, who conducted the famous Mel Lewis history of jazz drumming interviews, has begun posting excerpts from the interviews on his YouTube page. Which is lucky, because I think the source from which I […]
Accents in 5/4 – mixed rhythm – 01
Exhibit A for why we keep writing. I was practicing yesterday, and I thought hmmm I want to work on this one thing, and out the thousands of pages of drumming materials in my studio, […]
Drum technique magical nihilist death cult
Submitted without comment, excerpts from an internet forum conversation on drumming speed training “protocols.” “When are you considered to have truly ‘mastered’ a given tempo? For example, I could continually play 16th notes at 250bpm […]
Harmonic coordination whatsis – 02
There’s an easier way to play my patented new harmonic coordination whatsis™ technique— I thought about it for five minutes longer and thought of a better way to practice it. This is a way of […]
Another trip to Cymbal & Gong
A few videos from a quick visit with Tim Ennis at Cymbal & Gong headquarters yesterday, labeling and stamping cymbals, and picking out some Holy Grail and Mersey Beat cymbals for our demo tour in […]
Rub-a-dub lesson: Au Privave
Something a little more challenging to try rub-a-dub style. Since it’s not just a lick, but a way of playing figures and setups, musical context is important— we’re trying to make some written kicks, so just […]
Linear tweak
Here’s a minor tweak for the Gary Chaffee linear system, which we’ve been using a lot lately. I have never had a truly satisfactory way of teaching fills— there are lots of different materials for […]