We probably did something similar to this way back in ’12 or ’13, when I was writing a lot of stuff on samba. My writing and my knowledge of the style has improved a lot […]
Category: exercises
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 […]
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 […]
Stick Control drumset exercise – RLRR-LRLL
Part 3 of this series, where the need to write out the exercises becomes perhaps more apparent. We’re playing a basic drumset orchestration of exercises from the first page of Stick Control by George L. […]
Stick Control drumset exercise – RRLL and variations
This little series presents a kind of writing problem; it has to be either very short or very long, each of which will hit resistance with users. I’ve done it the long way, simply because […]
Figure Control: 6-4 – Lilin – 01
Let’s just assume every post begins with an apology for the light posting— I’ve just been very busy with playing, teaching, and getting ready for an art show this past few weeks. This Funk Control/Figure […]
Stick Control drumset exercise – basic
This is the type of thing I usually wouldn’t bother writing out, the instructions are so simple, but the more advanced variations are challenging enough that you’ll want to see them on paper. So let’s […]
Figure Control – 6/4 – 02
Another page of Funk Control type exercises for use with my Stereolab/Free Design practice loop. We’re calling this portion of the series Figure Control since it’s not really funk, and we’re basing the exercises on a […]
Displacing a groove – 16th notes – 02
Part 2 of the previous displacement thing. This is the kind of thing that’s so obvious I don’t like to put it on the site, but it’s an intermediate step to the next thing, and […]
Displacing a groove – 16th notes – 01
This is an easy funk exercise, getting acquainted with rhythmic displacements that happen routinely in funk drumming, while relating them back to a simple groove. When this word displacement comes up, it’s usually suggestive of […]
Three Camps – isolated parts and complete piece
UPDATE: Jeez, I’m getting sloppy. Typos in the pdf fixed…. You know, I’ve never settled on a really satisfactory presentation of Three Camps— the very famous, very old rudimental snare drum piece. It’s much simpler […]