Addressing the classic drum clinic question once again. In 2019, under the sway of our friend in Berlin, Michael Griener, after about 10 years of using the Vic Firth SD-11 Slammer (a maple 5B) or […]
Year: 2022
Stick control patterns in 6/8
This is part of a larger writing project I’m doing— some things you have to write out to decide if they’re going to be of any use. You can see that the logical sequence here […]
Solo transcription: Elvin Jones – Crisis
Here’s Elvin Jones’s drum solo on that tune Crisis, from Freddie Hubbard’s Ready For Freddie, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. It contains some classically Elvin stuff, and is good for some […]
CYMBALISTIC: Get ’em while they’re hot
CYMBALISTIC: Service announcement— cymbal business has really been cooking this winter, so if you have your eye on any of the wonderful Cymbal & Gong cymbals on my Cymbalistic site, it’s best to act fairly […]
Max wants you to turn off YouTube
“We used to listen to records and take off the record what the person was doing. You didn’t see the person. You’d just hear it. We’d figure out what was happening with our ears. Then […]
Stick Control with short bell logic
Another one of my little photoshop gags— I edited a jpeg of the first page of exercises in Stick Control to follow the logic of the Afro “short bell” pattern*, which has beats 1 and 4 […]
Very occasional quote of the day: you have to be there to play every night
“You have to work with the people for a while. I was talking to Jo Jones one day. He commented something like, ‘It’s very important how a person develops his own musical personality.’ He says, […]
An Elvin-inspired lick
A page inspired by something that came up on Elvin Jones’s solo on the tune Crisis, which I partially transcribed last week. It’s not even a lick, it’s something funny that happened with his timing, […]
Reed tweak: paradiddle fill in
Some of these Reed systems are so sprawling that you can spend months working your way through them. This one is nice and limited. There’s exactly one thing to do, and relatively few lines from […]
Practice loop: McCoy swing
Here’s a crushing new practice loop I’ve been playing with a lot lately, sampled from the tune Little Brother, from McCoy Tyner’s album Song of the New World. People get so precious about their approach […]
Syncopation rhythms – dotted quarter note spacing
A page of practice rhythms, with dotted quarter note spaced notes, and no more than two notes in a row with an 8th note spacing. Most of these are already scattered all over the book […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Crisis
Does the site need another Elvin Jones transcription? I don’t know. I’m just putting in my devotional time listening very closely to Elvin. What you all do with it is up to you. This is […]