Here is a collection of ten loops for learning jazz tunes, sampled from albums, including several by Thelonious Monk. Each has the head played, then an equal number of choruses of soloing— one or two. […]
Category: downloads
Left foot coordination – warm ups
It’s warm ups week around here. Some elementary patterns for coordinating the left foot with the cymbal, bass drum, and snare drum. For general purposes— it also can go with this basic bossa nova page, […]
Chop busters in 7/8 – 01
A page of technical phrases for snare drum, in 7/8 time, after Ron Fink’s book of the same name. One thing I admire in anything technical is good structure— I talk about it, meanderingly, in […]
Reed tweak: endurance exercise for improving singles
This is a real straightforward exercise for improving short single stroke fills, using unisons. Based on a normal interpretation used with Syncopation, by Ted Reed— playing the book rhythm as accents on the cymbals (with […]
Stick Control in triplets redux
Rewriting something from 2012, that is really unreadable: the first page of Stick Control in triplets, in two voices. I was really unkind in the early years of this site, really jamming a lot of […]
Making rock fill phrases
A couple of very dense pages here, giving every step of, and a number of possibilities for, turning some basic rock beats into figure and fill phrases. This should be the kind of thing you […]
Level system warm ups
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 […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Blessing In Disguise
From the record East Broadway Run Down, by the late Sonny Rollins. The record is an old favorite of mine, but not one of his most famous. Recorded in 1966, the recorded quartet includes Elvin […]
Paradiddle-diddles embellished
Some things to do with paradiddle-diddles. This started with this lesson— we were playing them with a slight crescendo, with an accent on the end. These aren’t necessarily great for speed, it doesn’t matter. There […]
Matthew’s Tunji lesson
Was working with a student on a couple of recent things: this sort of approach, using these pages as a rhythm library, playing along with the loop sampled from Tunji, by John Coltrane. These are […]