Here’s another set of stickings for that last “fast within slow” Reed interpretation. The major thing we’ll be using is the sixtuplet form of the six stroke roll— or the “Swiss” sixtuplet, as I sometimes […]
Category: exercises
Reed interpretation: fast within slow
Our philosophy around here is to never stray too far from Reed without good reason— I have to relearn that every few years. So here’s a thing for beginning to develop the Jack Dejohnette-style “fast within […]
Page o’ coordination: 5/4 with tie across the barline
Here’s a Page o’… for getting comfortable handling an accented note tied across the barline in 5/4: For the sake of clarity, I’ve written the page without the advertised ties; but you should be thinking […]
Snare drum workout in 2/4
Easing back into posting stuff, this is a short snare drum workout in 2/4, based on a simple accent pattern, developing a quasi-rudimental, flam drag/flam accent/flamacue-thing I improvised while warming up on a practice pad. […]
Page o’ coordination: Elvin waltz, with 16th notes
An big part of the Elvin Jones “thing” (if we must think of it that way), which doesn’t get talked about much, is 16th notes. People instantly think Elvin >>> triplets!, but he played a […]
Page o’ coordination: Elvin’s waltz — inverted feet
Once you start doing an Elvin-like thing, the pull of that dotted-quarter rhythm can be very hard to resist; it’s effective, it builds tension, and it feels good to play it, but you need to […]
Page o’ coordination: Elvin’s waltz in 4/4
It could look an awful lot like I’m phoning it in with all of these Pages o’ Coordination— well, I am phoning it in, a little bit, but that’s not to say the pages aren’t […]
Stick Control on the drums: RLRL and LRLR
UPDATE: The link is now working. All reet, I’ve gotten my hallway and kitchen painted, and finished getting my teeth and gums viciously probed, if only for the time being, so let’s get back to […]
Todd’s tom tom thing — part 1
This is something that has come up organically in my own playing, which I’ve been trying to get a handle on more systematically— we saw a little bit of this before with my “quasi-African” tom […]
Page o’ coordination: Afro 6/8 — a hard one
This is something I wasn’t going to post until I had made decent headway with it; which I have, at the cost of some misery. If you’ve been keeping up with current events, the Afro […]
Page o’ coordination: Afro 9/8
The “Afro” feel in 9/8, or 3/4, is not exactly a standard feel, but it does come up. Like, in Portland, a tune by the drummer/composer Lawrence Williams gets called quite often, among several different […]
Stone method for uptempo jazz — 01
Most of the regular drumming literature is poorly adapted to the special conditions of very fast tempos in jazz; the practice materials are either too dense, or are triplet-based, which obviously isn’t going to work. […]