Using this framework a lot with my students in recent months, marking up Funky Primer with a Sharpie, putting accents over the bass drum notes to indicate a crash, marking over the remaining notes with […]
Category: A Funky Primer
Rock with Stick Control!
A little thing I improvised while warming up for a rehearsal. All my rock stuff is oriented around getting off the hihat, getting both hands moving around the drums. A lot of students get locked […]
Beats to fills
Here’s a connecter idea, using some rock beats written normally, a la Funky Primer, but playing them as cymbal accents with fills, as in this rock fill drill— hitting accents on the cymbal/bass drum, and […]
Stickings a la Funky Primer
This is part of why I write so much stuff— you never know what a particular student is going to need, and in what form. For whatever weird reason, somebody will do really well with […]
Funky Primer p. 22 converted to sixtuplet funk
In a lesson the other day I realized I don’t really like any of the sixtuplet funk materials in my regular books. Joel Rothman’s are pretty good, Funky Primer are pretty not good, Jim Payne’s […]
Hemiola funk series: Funky Primer – p. 22
Here’s an easy little thing, bringing together two funk items: I’ve taken a familiar page from Charles Dowd’s Funky Primer, and re-written it with the patterns used in my hemiola funk series. You know what […]
A Funky Primer: double-time feel lesson
Getting back into teaching out of a book I haven’t used in some time: A Funky Primer, by my former college professor Charles Dowd. I felt it was getting a little dated, and I was […]
Typos in Funky Primer
Time to get out your white-out again. This is something that had been bugging me for many years of working with A Funky Primer, by my old professor, Charles Dowd. Most of the book consists […]