Updating my old badly formatted page of polyrhythms from 2013, adding some things, and hopefully making it easier for more people to read and use. I’ve written them in the easiest possible form, expressed as […]
Category: downloads
Singles speed builder
This is a page for developing fast singles, for my students— maybe you can use it too. Like anything else, your results may vary teaching it to yourself. You can contact me for lessons on […]
More on that Latin system
Breaking down part of that short Latin method from the other day. I like it. It’s easy, and gets us into some pretty fundamental things about rhythm, drumming, using the drum set. This is a […]
Todd’s jazz drill
A summary of something I’ve been doing lately. I hadn’t practiced for about a week, so to get my act together, I drilled some standard jazz methods using that recent page of practice rhythms. I […]
Cliché control – 5 stroke singles
Another Cliché Control page for learning to solo in jazz, combining stock licks. This time centered around 5-stroke singles: RLRLR or RLRLB. We’re squarely in Philly Joe / Art Blakey territory here— and a lot […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes 8s
Hot on the heels of that “too perfect” post, here’s a great example of what I’m talking about in terms of playing with an edge: Roy Haynes trading 8s with Chick Corea on Rhythm-a-ning, from […]
Listening: Up Jumped Spring
I started transcribing this, but was too distracted by Ukraine developments to finish more than a page of it. It’s Up Jumped Spring, by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Backlash— I’m listening to a lot […]
Stick control in 12/8 – “Afro logic”
Here’s what that page of 6/8 sticking patterns was setting up— and that funny joke photoshopped page from Stone: sticking combinations in 12/8, oriented like the Afro “short bell” rhythm, with one pattern on beats […]
Stick control patterns in 6/8
This is part of a larger writing project I’m doing— some things you have to write out to decide if they’re going to be of any use. You can see that the logical sequence here […]
Solo transcription: Elvin Jones – Crisis
Here’s Elvin Jones’s drum solo on that tune Crisis, from Freddie Hubbard’s Ready For Freddie, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. It contains some classically Elvin stuff, and is good for some […]
An Elvin-inspired lick
A page inspired by something that came up on Elvin Jones’s solo on the tune Crisis, which I partially transcribed last week. It’s not even a lick, it’s something funny that happened with his timing, […]
Syncopation rhythms – dotted quarter note spacing
A page of practice rhythms, with dotted quarter note spaced notes, and no more than two notes in a row with an 8th note spacing. Most of these are already scattered all over the book […]