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 […]
Category: downloads
Alternating triplets, off the 1
Dealing with a lot of small items lately. We know all the big stuff, now we’re getting into how to practice it in a musically natural way, how to fit it naturally into a continuity. […]
Two Reed funk tweaks
A couple of very little half time funk things, just significant enough to be worthy of mention. They’ll be folded into a complete method, if and when I get around to writing it. I’m going […]
Reed p. 38 – double time
This is sort of a writing experiment based on page 38 (née 37) in Ted Reed’s Syncopation, double timing each measure. I think it’ll be of limited usefulness, but it’s such a familiar page of […]
Paradiddles with Bellson
Throwing a bone to fans of Louis Bellson’s Modern Reading Text in 4/4 here, with an easy paradiddle system. Most of these things happen naturally out of my teaching, or my playing; here I just […]
Subtractive method in 7: fills
Continuing this item from the other day, introducing some light fills, or general variety of texture, to that bossa type groove, in 7/4. This is actually really, really good for getting a basic creative playing […]
Eight stroke rolls?
Reading George Lawrence Stone’s Technique of Percussion, in a 1953 International Musician column he discusses “compound” rolls— rolls including two accented singles. The six stroke roll is most familiar of that type, the 10 stroke […]
Songo moves
Variations on a songo rhythm, hands only. The usual groove is kind of a set thing, that can be a hard thing to break away from, so this page forces the issue, opening it up […]
Pataflafla builder
Exceptionally granular page of exercises developing the pataflafla, a drag variant, and Steve Gadd’s pataflafla-ed 6 stroke roll— you can hear that in his solo on the Tom Scott record here. Usually I would walk […]
Subtractive method in 7 – 01
Extending our previous hard form of this subtractive method— in which we read rhythms from Syncopation, and voice them on the snare and bass drums according to an underlying 8th note pattern, BSSB-SBBS. We could […]
Double bass, natural sticking
This is almost nothing, I’m just writing out some examples of a simple idea for a student, to go with the verbal explanation I gave in the lesson. If I were playing double bass, I […]
Rudimental Reed: two methods
A whole lot of snare drum happening right now. Here are two pretty basic things to do with Syncopation on the practice pad, first with short rolls on the short notes and paradiddles on the […]