Comping: triplets to 16ths – 01

A little companion to that butchery of the Chapin book I committed the other day. Here we’re starting with a single ordinary triplet pattern, and then showing some ways of converting it to straight 8ths and 16th notes.

If you listen to some Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Cobb, for example, you can hear some of this. Anybody you hear double timing in their comping. This also makes me think of Mingus, with the horn backgrounds in double time.

Add hihat on 2, omit the bass drum on part 1, at first, to just get oriented with the hands only. 16ths and 8ths are played straight, and legato, not swung. You could alternate between the triplet pattern for each part, and each of the 16th note patterns— one, two, or four times each.

There are a lot of patterns, the point is to illustrate a concept. Hopefully there will only be a few of them people actually have to practice, most of them should be easy to play through quickly. File it with my recent triplet burnout pages, and do similar types of things with them.

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