Please forgive the slow posting here— lots of work going on with site other than just writing for it. As soon as I have my act together there, we’ll be back to a normal pace of stuff, and new stuff, like more and better videos than this one.
Second time I’ve done this. Having duly accused Ginger Baker of being the narcissist (that he was), I will now lovingly and with great self regard transcribe some of my own playing, and analyze it a bit. I was playing along with a McCoy Tyner loop while messing with my EAD-10, and had done several takes working on camera angles. It illustrates some of the things I do, but also how unforgiving recordings can be.
Here is the video, first with the drums soloed, then with the loop audible:
McCoy is playing a lot of 16ths, and my cymbal rhythm leans into a dotted 8th/16th kind of a feel here. It’s all written normally in swing 8ths; where I write actual 16th note rhythms, it’s part of a passage where the timing is very particular. I’m not playing the hihat over-strong, and it’s not doing much of anything more than being an anchor.
There are some spots where I drift slightly from the loop— within the normal tolerances for real playing, and not egregious when the drums are soloed, but it sounds like a real mistake playing with a fixed background. And there are a couple of spots where what I play clashes with the piano, when that’s audible. In real life both players would be adjusting to try to make it work— and maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. It’s actually pure laziness on my part that I allowed it to happen here. Playing this way we’re missing a fundamental part of the contract, I’m not thinking the way I would be if I was playing real music with people. Towards the end I’m throwing some things in in a slovenly way, without feeling a musical need, which I do not do when playing. Honestly it wouldn’t hurt me to feel a little freer in that respect…
The transcription is pretty accurate, except for the real nightmarish-looking measures. Like, that is basically what happened, literally, but what we see here is not how I arrived at it.
The fluffy parts really have something ordinary underlying them, I’ve just fluffed them out, made them irregular so my hands are finding their own way of moving. They’re trained enough that what comes out isn’t pure slop, but it’s not really anything transcribable either. How you arrive there is by making a lot of unfocused free jazz static, as I have, and then go for the same kind of motion in a metered environment, until you can get out of it without blowing the time altogether.
I’ll be looking at some of those parts and seeing if I can make any kind of rational system of practice from them, I think there are some interesting things that could be developed, that would be worthwhile.
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.
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