Straight’s Modern Syncopated Rhythms

We must get away from the old military method of drumming and play the Drum part the same lead as the Violin, Saxophone or Xylophone parts.

Let’s take a close look at a very old book, Edward B. Straight’s Modern Syncopated Rhythms For Drums, which is now in the public domain, and freely available on line through Archive.org. I’ve accumulated a few copies of Straight’s books over the years, and was surprised at how modern they are, given that they were published between 1908 and 1936. This one came out in ’32.

He was once Gene Krupa’s teacher, and was one of the major drumming education people of the era, having founded the National Association for Rudimental Drummers (N.A.R.D.) with Wm. F. Ludwig Sr. and George Stone. His name comes up more than once as a peer in Stone’s Technique of Percussion. He originated the very modern, post-rudimental natural sticking system— sometimes called Straight sticking— and a lot of what we see here anticipates things we still do today. Like I’m writing new stuff based on these same things, now, this month.

The “drum set” then was fundamentally a snare drum and bass drum affair— along with a pile of “traps” for accents, effects, and tonal variety— so the book is primarily about the two drums, with instructions to keep the hands moving to the other instruments.

With Exercise 1 we have some alternating accented 8th notes. The patterns are good, he does a very smart thing of marking the sticking of the accents only, and has us counting out loud in 2. And he’s done the musical thing, and put an ending on each line:

Exercise 2 is similar, except the left plays running 8ths, and the right adds accents on top of it— moving the right around “to different traps”, as he says. He also has notates quarter notes on the bass drum.

In Exercise 3 we add 16th notes— and notice that we’re in natural sticking now, with the right hand falling on the 8th notes, and the left playing any es and as, and some &s. We’re sort of backing into a right hand lead system with this.

Exercise 4 is similar, with a little more variety, and breaks in the rhythm. Exercise 5, goes a little further, introducing some syncopated 16th rhythms:

Subsequent pages up to Exercise 10 take the same idea further, or with slightly different rhythmic emphasis.

With Exercise 11 we get into something interesting— accented 8ths with the bass drum in unison. The actual rhythms are very good, very much like what we get from Ted Reed’s Syncopation.

He suggests practicing this a number of ways:

• Alternating 8ths— RLRL
• RH/BD only
• LH/BD only
• As a long roll— it’s not precisely clear what he means. He says the right hand will fall on all the 8th notes, suggesting that we’re to fill in the unwritten 16ths with the left, giving us alternating 16ths, which should be played with roll strokes— double strokes or multiple bounce strokes.
• Play all 8ths with LH on tom tom, add RH on accented notes on cymbal. Play quarter notes on bass drum underneath.
• Both hands in unison on all the 8ths, flamming the accents.

I was hoping we would see an actual modern right hand lead option here— with the RH playing the accents and the LH playing the other notes— but we don’t get that… yet.

With Exercises 12 and 13 we get more accented 16ths on the snare drum, with drags added in Exercise 14:

Normally with writing of this era we would see the drags written ruff-style, as unmetered grace notes. These way of writing them metrically accurately, falling on the 16ths is very modern— this is the way drags were written when I was in corps in the 80s, minus the ties.

With Exercise 15 we have a page of accented stick shots— the xs indicate the RH striking the left stick, pressed against the head:

Exercises 16 and 17 use a dotted-16th/32nd rhythm, and 16ths with flammed accents, respectively. And in Exercise 18 we get accented 16ths with the bass drum in unison with some of the accents, and off the accents:

So far the 16ths have been accented with the right hand only, in Execise 19 we get some left hand accents— again marking the sticking of the accented notes only, always a key point when learning accents, you have to anticipate which hand the accent will fall on. Exercise 20 adds drags, with the accent falling on the doubled note.

Finally, with Exercise 21, we get to the very modern stuff, actual right hand lead, with the right hand playing the accents, and the left hand filling in. Actually the some of the right hand notes are also unaccented, so the left never has to play more than one note at a time. He also inverts it, with the left hand doing all the accents— still never more than one note at a time.

We get a little sense of what kind of limitations people were expecting with the left hand, at that point in history…

Subsequently we get a number of pages dedicated to a practical form of march vocabulary, and then, with Exercise 37, an illustration of the natural or Straight sticking technique with 16th notes, that he calls Subtraction. Very significantly, to us.

Subtraction. You could call it a subtractive… method. Perhaps I am not insane.

Subsequent exercises have us doing similar materials to what we’ve seen, mostly written in cut time. Again noting that his roll and drag notation (and his writing, actually) is much more modern than what we see in rudimental materials at the time, and after:

And, every time I think we’re done here, I find another notably modern item, like this page of rhythms that could have been copied, 25 years in advance, from Ted Reed:

After that we get some more pages of right hand lead materials, including with stick shots and other embellishments, and some odds and ends: “Oriental” beats, playing on the rims, quarter note and half note triplets. Overall, it’s quite remarkable— this is plainly the direct ancestor of the economical, rhythm (as opposed to rudiment) oriented modern school of playing that we see in Reed, and in Alan Dawson’s teaching, and from players like Bob Moses and many others.

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