Still hard at work on the new Cymbalistic site, which will be going live any minute now. I’m at the designing-cruise-ship-drummer-themed-merch-while-waiting-for-domain-cot-com-to-let-me-log-in-to-my-account-so-I-can-reset-the-domain-to-take-you-to-shopify phase. That old story. In the mean time, in honor of Tony Williams’s birthday, […]
Author: Todd Bishop
CYMBALISTIC: Shopify store coming!
UPDATE: Soft launch time— the new store is now active— I’m writing an official announcement as we speak. Feel free to swing by, check it out, ask questions. No doubt lots of little things will need to […]
Very occasional quote of the day: technique
What if you think of something to play that doesn’t have a standard technique? That’s what jazz cats have been doing since jazz was born. All of a sudden, you want to play something that […]
Drummers as an inferior class
Savoring the persecution “Drummers are known to be a race on their own.” – Joe Morello “General Browning, I am a Pole, considered by some to be smart.” – First line spoken by Gene […]
Mel Lewis stuff!
A flurry of drumming activity of actual interest on Bluesky this morning. So far much of the drumming content there has been pretty mundane, but they’ve added ~ ten million new users in the last […]
Conductor of form
The general topic here is jazz comping— some general concepts thereof, getting into what I think is missing from a lot of students’ playing, even as they do the basic thing pretty well. The following […]
Hey, follow me on Bluesky
SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: I have now abandoned that festering hell site formerly known as Twitter, and invite you to follow me on Bluesky, a vastly more friendly environment for good and sane people. There’s a nice […]
Expanding a concept – 01
This is connected with all the fill related jive we’ve been dealing with lately. I share it with you to illustrate a thought process, not a particular set of licks. These are some things I […]
Transcription: Mickey Roker – Essence
I’ve gone a little nuts with the ghost note notation, but it’s accurate— a lot of the comping activity is very soft. We can assume he’s feathering the bass drum most of the time; I’ve […]
Reed tweak: RH lead triplets – fast within slow
This has been an item of interest for a long time— playing fast in a slow tempo. In a master class Peter Erskine mentioned that Jack Dejohnette was the only drummer he knew who could […]
Two measure Reed phrases – 02
Another cut-and-paste, hack-and-slash job, extracting some two measures phrases from the full page exercises in Syncopation. For when I want a particular kind of phrase, and don’t want to hunt around the eight pages for […]
More 3/8 fills – 01
Here are some things I was playing around with while playing my page of 3/8 fills— embellishments on things on that page. Some odd stickings, or normal stickings I would play in an odd way. […]