I keep feeling like I have to justify doing so much with the Afro 6/8. I’m just working with it a lot, and here we are nothing if not personal and idiosyncratic. I also feel […]
Category: exercises
Swing coordination: Dahlgren & Fine format — 01
In the swing section of their book 4-Way Coordination, Marvin Dahlgren and Eliot Fine created a fairly ingenious framework for writing related exercises in multiple time signatures. With my Pages o’ Coordination I’ve been following […]
Todd’s methods: Reed with RB and BR
Playing Latin styles, you end up using a lot of sticking combinations of RB and BR— B meaning both hands together— so here’s a basic way of using Ted Reed’s Syncopation to work on that. […]
Rumba clave basic coordination — hands only
Per the title, here we have some basic coordination with rumba clave, for hands only. The first set are just logical patterns based on clave— notes in unison with it, before it, after it, or […]
Page of ten stroke rolls
Here’s a pretty straightforward page of ten stroke rolls, open, in a variety of rhythms and meters. A ten stroke open roll consists of four doubles and two taps— one at the beginning and one […]
Afro 6/8: a Stone-based method
First, sorry if you want to read about stuff other than this Afro 6/8 thing— you can always do a fresh root-through of our voluminous archives— I happen to be working with this a lot, […]
Page o’ coordination: the middle of the triplet
[UPDATE: download link is working now!] This is the first of two rather punishing entries into this Afro 6 series of stuff; this is actually preparation for the next one, which is really hard. Here […]
Page o’ coordination: 2 over 3 metric modulation
We’ve done some jazz waltz POCs, and some metric modulation POCs, but some people will still have problems moving between the two in actual playing, so here’s something that may help with that. The modulation […]
Todd’s African triplet lick
I call this an African idea, but really it’s just a thing that keeps happening when I solo with an Afro 6 feel; it’s African by vibe. And it’s not really a “lick”, it’s more […]
Page o’ coordination: bass drum variation in 6/8
Are you getting to the point that you can work these up in a few days, and then retire them, yet? We’ve done a big pile of these POCs, but they cover a fairly narrow […]
Page o’ coordination: across the barline in 5/4
This is a classic situation when you start improvising in 5/4: you get a little cocky about your ability to just vibe the meter and come out OK, and in a few moments you observe […]
Afro 6/8 exercise: getting the 3/4 pull
More on this. All I can say is, my readers should be absolutely killing it with their Afro 6/8 in the next 6-12 months. This is a basic counting and coordination exercise I’ve been using with […]