Man, it’s tougher to get back in the swing of this than you would think. Like anything else, it’s a fairly minor daily effort, but you do have to do it! I do have some […]
Category: exercises
Page o’ coordination: 6/8 Rumba clave in the left hand
Like I said: a lotta 6/8. That feel has always been one of the stronger elements of my playing, but I thought I’d see what happens if I do a whole lot of more work […]
Survival chops: cymbal and bass drum licks
Here is a collection of moderately easy, very functional, right-hand lead licks for the drum set. Normally I would arrive at these by other means— like, by playing Stick Control, Syncopation, or any paradiddle rudiment, […]
Kerrigan syncopation exercise in 6/8
I guess there’s no getting around it: we’re all about the 6/8 these days— there’s a whole bunch more of this on deck. This is a Chuck Kerrigan syncopation exercise, from his very useful Syncopated […]
Snare studies for developing some Afro-Cuban bell patterns
There is so much heavy coordination involved in learning the Afro-Cuban styles that it’s easy to neglect simply getting the bell patterns right— which is a lot like playing jazz without spending any time working […]
Page of Guaguancó
Lately I’ve been whittling away at my ignorance of Afro-Cuban/Salsa drumming, and here we’ll look at Guaguancó (say wah-wahn-CO), or Rumba Guaguancó, a very distinctive and popular style I first became acquainted with via a […]
Page o’ coordination: 6/8 clave in the right hand
Hey, we haven’t had a page o’ coordination in awhile. I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Afro-Cuban stuff lately, via our page of Mozambique, the 6/8 page from last year, and with […]
Page of Mozambique — UPDATED
I’ve been working with our earlier page of Mozambique quite a bit (yes, I do in fact practice the non-transcription stuff I post here), and thought it could use a bit of refining, so here […]
Survival chops: six-stroke rolls
Or as I usually call them, “Swiss” sixtuplets— that’s my own coinage, based on an overheard conversation between two drum corps legends, George Tuthill and Alan Kristensen, who were my corps director and percussion instructor […]
It’s a flam accent throwdown!
Oh, it’s on.* I guess. At least, Sam Nadel has posted a nice flammed triplet warm-up, and, inspired by that, I wrote a similar one of my own, with flam drags, and same-handed flam accents, […]
Making bass drum punctuations while feathering
A couple of the problems I have with the idea of playing time with the bass drum (“feathering”) in jazz are: 1) it’s easy to play the feathered notes too loud— a very hokey thing […]
More meter-within-meter phrases
Here’s a little supplement to the meter-within-meter introduction of a few days ago: some additional two, four, and eight measure practice phrases: It’s easy to get yourself into trouble with this, so it’s important to […]