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 […]
Category: exercises
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 […]
Getting started with meter-within-meter
Playing meter-within-meter— playing in one meter during a tune in a different one— is a very common rhythmic element in jazz, which became fully realized in drumming during the 1960’s by Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, […]
Page o’ coordination: metric modulation — 2/3
Part 2 of this little three-page o’… unit. Actually, there are a couple of other previous pages you can work up as well— once you’ve learned any one page of this series, the others are […]
Page o’ coordination: metric modulation — 1/3
Or rather superimposed metric modulation, per Vinnie Colaiuta’s term, which few people use, but is actually correct. This is the first of three pages ‘o… developing a swing feel in 2 within a measure of […]
Exercises for developing a common Reed interpretation
Following up on the Key to right hand accented triplets post, here is a set of exercises for getting my recommended stickings together: Get the pdf