There’s got to be a better title for that, but I don’t know what it is. Frankly, I’m just lucky if I can get anything posted at all at this point. Here we’re looking at […]
Category: downloads
Rudimental Reed: five stroke rolls
I’ve been fooling around with applying some rudiments to the long exercises in Syncopation, by Ted Reed. We’ll start humbly with it, converting the written quarter notes (and tied 8ths) to untied rolls– an 8th […]
Double time feel / half time feel
Hm, maybe being extraordinarily busy will force me to finally do some things that are actually accessible to people. Here’s another easy thing, illustrating half time feel and double time feel using basic rock beats. […]
Survival chops: accented 8ths
This is never too far from my mind anyway, but playing a salsa gig this weekend it occurred to me how little advanced chops are required in most musical situations. What is usually required is […]
The Kenny Note
As I was listening to the Kenny Clarke record Detroit Jazzmen it jumped out at me that Clarke really favors comping with the snare drum on the & of 1 and/or 3: Get the pdf […]
Transcription: Blue Seven
UPDATE: PDF link working now! I can’t believe I’ve never transcribed this one before. This is a very famous drum solo by Max Roach, on the tune Blue Seven from the album Saxophone Colossus by […]
Rock in 5/4: Water by PJ Harvey
Here’s a song I was working on with one of my students which happens to be timely since it’s in 5/4— Water, by PJ Harvey, with a great pop drumming performance by Robert Ellis. What […]
Afro 6/8: left hand variations – the basics
Here’s something challenging for you. I’ve been working with left hand variations within the Afro-Cuban 6/8 (or Bembe, Naningo, whatever term you use) in a variety of formats for about the last year– mostly applying […]
More fun with waltzes
I’ve been using these Elvin’s Afro-Waltz things almost daily in my practicing since I started writing them, and they’re working really great for me, so here’s a new one. This uses the same concept as […]
Cracking 5/4: rock variations
I wasn’t planning on making this part of this series, but it happened to come up. I was prepping for a recording session today which will involve a couple of tunes in 7/4, and I […]
Hemiola applications: funk
Here are some very straightforward funk applications derived from the 3:2 polyrhythm in 4/4 in the hemiola basics post. By isolating each measure, revoicing the parts slightly, and adding obvious things like a downbeat on […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Your Lady
Lately I keep doing the bulk of the hard work on these things, only to run out of steam in the last 12 bars, but David in the comments was able to shame me into […]