I am interested in helping you keep your practice from becoming impure.– Shunruyu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind At the same time, they praised him when he didn’t deserve it. “I’d have games when I’d […]
Author: Todd Bishop
I'm a drummer, drum teacher, Origin recording artist, and visual artist living in Portland, Oregon.
Essential listening for combo playing
Listening to jazz records for the specific purpose of knowing what you’re doing playing in a combo setting— playing “regular” mainstream jazz. We’ll leave listening related to very modern playing as a separate topic. And […]
Stick Control for fills
I get pretty individualized finding the best way for my students to work on something. People come to me with a lot of different levels of background, and playing goals, so I can’t just give […]
Stupid in the form of a polyrhythm
Ever wonder how to play a 3:4:5:6 polyrhythm? Well, here you go: Those are the kinds of questions people ask at music.stack.exchange, where I’ve been visiting recently. It’s somewhat refreshingly fact oriented— it’s heavily moderated […]
Very occasional quote of the day: Max fast – 02
SF: Some of the tempos that you play are lightning fast. MR: That’s done through combinations though! No one limb is overworking. There’s a way that it works itself out so that all the weight […]
Reed interpretations: 5 stroke rolls with stick shots
At a certain point in our pratice journey with the book Syncopation, restricting ourselves to things that can be done by a single set of rules becomes limiting. I was workshopping this with a student— […]
Groove o’ the day: Samba in 7
Here’s a bright samba groove in 7/4, played by Airto on Misturada, by the group Quarteto Novo. These are excerpts from the drum solo, starting at 0:49. Tempo is about quarter note = 220. I […]
CYMBALISTIC: developments
CYMBALISTIC: An interesting part of being a very small cymbal company, like Cymbal & Gong, is that there is some variance in the product over time. Day to day there may different guys at the […]
Very occasional quote of the day: time and feathering
“[T]here are certain things that will never change. Good time is good time, whether it’s Baby Dodds riding on a snare drum or Jack DeJohnette slammin’ a full kit. Time is time whether you put […]
Developing a Weckl lick – 01
Hot on the heels of the six stroke roll post, here is a related thing, a flashy fusion lick by Dave Weckl. I pulled it off of a Paquito d’Rivera album in about 1987, and […]
Six stroke roll combinations
No big deal, just a page of six stroke roll combinations and phrases, in 16th notes and 16th triplets. I call them that under duress, it just happens to be the common name for this […]
Things to listen for – ballads
Some things aren’t easily dealt with in transcriptions— you just have to listen a lot and notice things, and use them when you play. Here we’ll look at ballads, and the information you want to […]