Here’s a collection of brief exercises working out some basic combinations of strokes— full strokes, down strokes, taps, and up strokes. Called the Level System by some, it refers to how high the stick is […]
Category: accents
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 […]
Three Camps in 3
A few practice items coming up. Here’s the traditional rudimental item Three Camps converted into 3/4 time, two different ways— accenting the quarter notes, or accenting the swing dotted half notes. That latter is harder […]
Accents in Reed
TOTAL nerd stuff here. I use the accent pages in Progressive Steps to Syncopation (pp. 47-49) with my students for convenience, but I find them be a pain. They’re thorough, but poorly balanced— so if […]
Accents on 8/8 jazz rhythms
A background project lately has been to create some ways of practicing feathering the bass drum as part of a modern, varying, organic jazz texture. This page is related to some things I’m hearing in […]
Accented singles with rumba clave
I was playing along with a loop sampled from the track below, and wanted to have this page to work with. We’re doing accented accented singles— with a three note and five note spacing— along […]
Accents in 5/4 – mixed rhythm – 01
Exhibit A for why we keep writing. I was practicing yesterday, and I thought hmmm I want to work on this one thing, and out the thousands of pages of drumming materials in my studio, […]
5/8 accents in a triplet feel
I’ve worked on triplets and */8 feels a lot in my 35+ years playing the drums, and played a lot of music in the style, and still there’s a certain type of shuffle or 12/8 […]
Three Camps – isolated parts and complete piece
UPDATE: Jeez, I’m getting sloppy. Typos in the pdf fixed…. You know, I’ve never settled on a really satisfactory presentation of Three Camps— the very famous, very old rudimental snare drum piece. It’s much simpler […]
Stick Control patterns in 3/4, with flams and accents
A little companion to the page of Stone patterns adapted into 3/4, from the other day— here I’ve added some flams and accents to the sticking patterns from that page: Quite a few of the […]