Here’s a conditioning page of 8ths notes played around the drums, with one hand. It’s easy enough that most drummers should be able to learn it well enough to play the page straight down in […]
Category: drums
Transcription: Elvin Jones — Summertime
Let’s start out the new year with a more substantial transcription than we’ve done in a while, in this case a very famous drum solo by Elvin Jones, on Summertime from John Coltrane’s My Favorite […]
Crossing accents
This very simple idea occurred to me while I was working on an Elvin Jones transcription today— either I had an insight into an underlying concept in his playing, or I was just daydreaming. What […]
RLB sticking applied
This is that previous right/left/bass sticking applied to Exercise 9 from Ted Reeds’s Syncopation (p. 45 in the old edition). The entire piece follows that sticking, except for a couple of spots. I’ve written in […]
Syncopation, Lesson 4, in 5/4
This is really a library piece— I use pp. 10-11 from Syncopation (that’s Lesson 4 in the new edition) so many different ways that I wanted to put it into 5/4. We’ll be referring to […]
Pad practice caveat
As someone who comes from the land of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, and the rest of that nightmare, it’s kind of quaintly Canadian that he calls this a “rant”, but Ted Warren says something […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes — Played Twice
I’m always listening to great drummers, but Roy Haynes just sweeps in and blows everyone away here. I love the way he plays this head. This is Thelonious Monk’s Played Twice, from The Straight Horn […]
Several ideas in 5/4
Nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but this came up today while I was working on Mevlevia, an ECM-type tune in a moderate 5. I’ve taken some basic patterns in 5/8, and applied them to a usable […]
Cascara coordination — 01
OK, I am seriously in need of a break from working on the book— finishing the damn thing is always the hardest. So here’s a page of exercises for developing coordination with the cascara, a […]
Groove o’ the day: “They called him Craw.”
This new grooves book is almost done, believe it or not— the 20% discount on the transcriptions book should be good for just a couple of more days. The last new thing I put in […]
Problem Child fills
I listened to Problem Child by AC/DC a lot when I was in the 8th grade, and just happened to put it on for the first time in a few years, and realized how much […]