A student has a gig coming up where she has to play the song Tequila, but didn’t know a beat to play on it. This is what we worked out in her lesson. She was […]
Category: downloads
NEW E-BOOK: 13 Essential Stickings
Here’s part of what I’ve been up to other than writing new blog posts— I’m releasing a new e-book today: 13 Essential Stickings for the Modern Drummer. If you ever get overwhelmed by the amount […]
Page o’ skiplets – 01
This is not a great method to self-teach, but for the few intrepid individuals this will help, or for the teachers out there whose students struggle to pick up jazz independence, this approach may help […]
Ben Riley comping
We lost a very great drummer this week, and one of a dwindling number of his generation: Ben Riley. He was best known for his playing with Thelonious Monk in the mid-60s, and with the […]
Chaffee linear phrases: adding 2s / triplets in 3/4
Another item we did some months ago: Gary Chaffee style linear phrases including a two-note pattern, this time in a triplet rhythm in 3/4. As you are no doubt familiar with by now, Chaffee wrote […]
Page o’ coordination: triplet pattern with cymbal variations – 02
Part 2 of something we did way back in January (where the hell did the year go, actually?), changing cymbal rhythms against a steady left hand and bass drum pattern. Here we’re just inverting the […]
Billy Higgins trading 4s
This is from the same tune as the recent post Comping The Billy Way— Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, with Hank Jones and Ray Drummond, from the album The Essence. Here Higgins is […]
Rock in 5/8 – 01
5/8 and 5/4 are good meters to practice to if you want to improve your concentration, and disrupt playing habits. Five-note patterns in general, too. For many years my playing was extremely 3 oriented; whatever […]
5/8 accents in a triplet feel
I’ve worked on triplets and */8 feels a lot in my 35+ years playing the drums, and played a lot of music in the style, and still there’s a certain type of shuffle or 12/8 […]
Comping the Billy way
Here’s a fresh lesson on simplicity in comping in jazz— file this along with the post about the “Kenny” note from a few years ago. I’ve transcribed some ideas from Billy Higgins’s playing on Things […]
Page o’ coordination: Latin in 3 – 05
This is a fairly subtle variation on this Afro 6 feel, which we’ve covered pretty fully in the past few years, and possibly one of the easier entries in the series. I suppose you could […]