Louis Bellson reading text in 4/4

2025 UPDATE: I can be such a pig with my writing— I’ve corrected a lot of very sloppy language in the original post, and added a few links.

Here at CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! we spend a lot of time with the book Syncopation, and very little time with its more expansive, more serious-seeming companion, Louis Bellson’s Modern Reading Text in 4/4. I’ve owned Bellson for many years, and every few years I try using it, and it never stays on my stand very long. Let’s take a look at what’s in it and figure out why. If you don’t own it, and want to follow along, you can view the book at Archive.org.

The book is comprised of full-page and half-page composed reading exercises covering all the variations on a single rhythm idea, or summarizing several rhythm ideas. In Reed, by contrast, the each single measure rhythm is written out on a full four-measure line of music; the longer exercises are the summaries of each section, or are the well known full page composed exercises. 

With Bellson you can of course just repeat the individual measures of each measure of the exercise several times, and then play the exercise straight through, but I prefer the one line format in Reed, especially for teaching students of different ages and abilities. The graphical representation of the four measure phrase is helpful, and it encourages better reading habits— a student can move their eye along the line of music and then repeat back to the beginning of the line, or look ahead to the next line and continue to the next exercise. That’s normal reading; picking out one measure of a piece and repeating it over and over is not so normal. 

Looking at the individual parts of Bellson: 

Quarter notes?
There is no dedicated section dealing with quarter notes and longer rhythms. I think that’s a mistake. Fluency with quarter notes is kind of an overlooked area, and I would have liked some studies including whole notes, half notes, and dotted half notes for use at fast tempos.  

Pages 4-8 – Quarter notes, 8th notes, 8th rests
These are good pages, and a little more in depth than the equivalent pages in Reed— includes many rhythms only written with syncopated-style notation in Reed, which I don’t really need.

Pp. 9-11 – Introducing the tie
Ties are important, but to me these pages aren’t well balanced for drumming practice. The Reed p. 33 summary of 8th rest/tie/syncopated summary illustrates the concept more quickly and clearly. I would rather pencil ties into Reed (or write my own original supplemental volume, which I will do, someday).

Pp. 12-13
Here they begin including some 16th note and triplet rhythms, that make it very hard to do the normal drum set systems we do with Reed. We get that stuff from snare drum books— Delecluse, Peters Podemski. I don’t really need it for developing drum set reading, and drum set practice systems. 

Pp. 14-25 – Syncopation
The first two pages of this section summarize how syncopated notation works. I think p. 33 of Syncopation does that better. The ten syncopation exercises on pp. 25 are fine, I just never use them. They include some non-standard notation, like writing three 8th rests in a row, or putting a syncopated quarter rest between two 8th notes, or tying two 8th notes when the first one falls on the beat, or egregiously violating the “imaginary barline” between beats 2 and 3. Yes, reading those probably helps my reading, but learning to read bad notation is not at all my primary purpose in using these books.

…and those situations could possibly come up, when reading for melodic instruments, but then we have other cues, like changes in pitch, to help negotiate the very weird notation. When it’s rendered as a one-note rhythm part, it’s just pointless.  

Pp. 26-39 – 16th notes and rests, tied 16ths
These pages cover a large gap in Reed, and should be very useful, but I find them quite tedious. Full pages dealing with a single type of 16th note rhythm, written as many different ways as possible. This is

where the book becomes increasingly focused on creating reading problems. It sacrifices its usefulness as an everyday practice book for the sake of forcing you to deal with exceptional reading situations. Like in one spot there’s a single measure with nine 16th rests. It’s exhausting to look at.  

And for all that, it totally ignores some common ways these rhythms are written—the e& page, for example, always writes that rhythm with all 16th notes or 16th rests, or tied 16ths. Never the way it’s most commonly seen: 16th rest / 16th note / 8th note.

This section is also not as useful as it might be because on drumset, in real life, I don’t have to read many 16th notes. When I need to practice a four note subdivision on the drum set, I practice Reed in 2/2. I teach reading 16th notes with a combination of snare drum and funk books. 

Pp. 40-46 – Ten syncopated exercises with 16th notes
These are not terrible, I just have little use for them. Each exercise is so varied they’re mainly only good for comping/independence practice— to do the other interesting and useful things involving filling in the gaps in the written rhythm, we would have to devise some new methods. Maybe that would be worthwhile, I just haven’t felt the need.   

P. 47-60 – Eighth note triplets
These pages are all about triplets and triplet partials using rests and ties. Seemingly this fills a large gap in Syncopation. But we do play a lot of triplets through the usual Reed methods, they’re just implied, and not written out. I don’t find it to be a problem, from a reading perspective, because, again, I don’t often have to read them in music for drum set. Learning to read them through regular snare drum books is enough.

…and once again, this section quickly devolves into graduate-school type reading puzzles. At a certain point, this focus on fragmentation begins to detract from the fundamental concept. It’s not that ambitious students shouldn’t be able to read it; that focus just detracts from the book’s day to day usefulness. Also, people should be learning what correct notation looks like— if this was someone’s primary reading book, they could get the idea that anything at all is accepted, and expected, and it definitely isn’t.  

Pp. 61-64 – Introducing the quarter note triplet
Another valuable subject missing from Reed… that instantly descends into flyshit-reading hell in this book. Same goes for the half note triplet section after it. 

Pp. 66-67 – Syncopation with triplets
Not terrible, but random. Put a permanent book mark on these pages, or tear out all the intervening pages. Not worth the effort to me. 

Pp. 68-81 – Fourteen exercises
Regular syncopation exercises with 16th notes and triplets included. These are reasonable, decent reading exercises, but again, the variety of rhythms makes them difficult to use for daily drumming practice— beyond just using them as complicated independence rhythms. 

Pp. 82-85 – 16th note triplets and 32nd notes
Not terrible, but you would have to devise a use for them on the drum set. Or just play them on the snare drum. Delecluse and Cirone are full of stuff like this. I’ve never seen anything like this when reading for drum set. 

Pp. 86-87 – Introducing double time
This is useful; we get some common syncopated rhythms, together with their double-time equivalent. But once again, the authors can’t resist messing with us by writing the rhythms in a bad, difficult to read style. How about if we learn THE CONCEPT, then you can teach us all the wrong ways it might be written?

Conclusion
So this is only partly a rhythm book— it’s at least 50% a reading-bad-notation book. I don’t know who needs to master this kind of reading in their day to day professional life— usually where there is a lot high-stakes reading happening, people know how to write. I think a lot of this is better covered with regular literature written or transcribed for the user’s actual instrument. 

And at some point with this, you’re just teaching people bad notation style. OK, we want to be prepared to read “anything”, but bad notation is way over-represented here, and the actual good notation just becomes part of the undifferentiated notation-bomb debris field. So some composition student works through this thing and thinks “I’ll just write a half note on the & of 2 and save money on ink, why not.”

Reed has it’s limitations, but as a day to day practice volume for drummers of all levels, it’s vastly superior— that just isn’t what Bellson’s Reading Text is about. You can fill in all the major gaps in Reed by just finding a copy of Chuck Kerrigan’s out of print Syncopated Rhythms for the Contemporary Drummer. Those two books form a drummer’s complete core rhythm vocabulary, which, having mastered that, you can then add whatever other oddball reading problems you want. 

By the way
Bellson’s other reading book, Odd Time Reading Text, is even worse. Maybe 15-20 of its 130 pages are useful— which may still be good enough reason to buy it. 

UPDATE A FEW DAYS LATER: Feeling compelled to try to corner myself into an embarrassed retraction of this whole piece, by finding a real invaluable drumming purpose for the book— so I’m practicing out of it more than I normally would. So far, I’m a little more annoyed with it than I already was. 

For example, looking at page 30— if we know going in that all the 16th notes on the page fall on the e&. it kind of defeats the purpose of writing it a lot of crazy ways to trip me up (and they only write it two ways). You’re not teaching me to read crazy notation, you’re teaching me to ignore the notation based on prior information. Is that the intended lesson? I don’t think so. 

And the formula of repeating a measure with the rhythm notated differently, or repeating the same rhythm except with 8th notes substituted for quarter notes— it gets tiresome. Mix it up, let me pretend I’m playing a piece. 

---

I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.

Email Todd | Call or text +1(503)380-9259 | Chat on WhatsApp