Another in this endless series of tweaks to a basic RH lead system, commonly associated with the book Progressive Steps to Syncopation, by Ted Reed. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
Let’s be clear, I am not screwing around daydreaming about new drum patterns here— this is about taking things we’ve worked out as isolated licks or patterns, and getting them into our playing by working them into an ongoing texture… which is provided by the Reed system. Learning any pattern or lick in isolation, the hard part is always how do I get this into my playing naturally. This is it, baby.
Or it’s one of the its. Today’s thing extends and connects with a paradiddle inversion tweak we did a couple of years ago. And it’s slightly different— here we’re busying up the cymbal rhythm— or the bass drum rhythm— by filling in some more 16ths.
In playing the normal RH lead system reading from Syncopation, generally there will be one, two or three notes of left hand filler. Parts A, B, and C above show possible ways of handling them. At the bottom of the page there is a three bar excerpt from Syncopation Exercise 1 on p. 38, written out the way it would be played with the first cymbal option.
The one thing this page doesn’t address is when there are two or more BD/cym notes in a row— in the example you just play them as 8th notes, but you could fill in between them with the left hand to make them 16th notes. That would give you an unbroken 16th note texture.
I associate all of this type of stuff with Jack Dejohnette, Jon Christiansen, Bob Moses, but it’s all over current drumming.