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, […]
Category: exercises
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
Key to right hand accented triplets using Syncopation
There’s a very common interpretation used with Ted Reed’s Syncopation: the right hand plays the melody line, swinging the 8th notes, and the left hand fills out the triplets— hopefully everyone has heard of that […]
Paradiddle-diddle variations, for jazz
Hey, we haven’t done anything for the snare drum in awhile— in my own practicing I’ve been preoccupied with Dahlgren & Fine’s Accent On Accents books, and Buster Bailey’s Wrist Twisters, and my students are […]
Page o’ coordination: another 5/4
OK, if you get burned playing a 5/4 because you haven’t practiced enough, don’t come crying to me. I’m doing all I can. This page is based on an ostinato that is sort of a […]
Page o’ coordination: 5/8 + 5/8 — 02
More fun with 5/4, gateway to all odd meters. I guess. Getting it together does seem to make the others quite a bit easier. This is our second entry using the 5/8+5/8 construction: When getting […]
Page o’ coordination: Songo — 02
This is the companion to the recent Songo page, which I thought you might want to work on concurrently— it’s the same set of exercises, with the clave rhythm in the left foot: Reread the […]
Page o’ coordination: Songo — 01
Here we’ll develop some bass drum variations for playing Songo, a popular Afro-Cuban/salsa drumset style, in case you’ve never heard of it. The first exercise is the ostinato, played with the hands only— the parts […]
Clave capers
Please don’t ask me about the title of this piece— I just wrote the first two words I thought of. I think there’s a Billy Taylor tune called Cuban Capers I played once… it’s not […]
Page o’ coordination: 5/8 + 5/8 — 01
Another page o’ coordination in 5/4. From the amount of time we spend dealing with playing in 5, you might get the impression that I think it’s pretty damned important. I really don’t, but it […]