Our previous “samba builder” was very batucada-focused (and probably in need of an update); this has more to do with samba as played on the drums, like in our Milton Banana pieces. The method is straightforward; […]
Category: exercises
Dahlgren & Fine in 5/4
This is a way of playing 4-Way Coordination, by Marvin Dahlgren & Elliot Fine, which I’ve been using while playing along with Jan Garbarek’s Dansere, and Gary Burton’s Mevlevia— most of 4WC is just too […]
Survival chops: right hand lead
This is the second in an extremely short series covering the bare essentials of what you need for “drumistic” fill, variation, and solo material across a variety of styles— you can read the intro to […]
8th notes around the drums — one hand
Here’s a conditioning page of 8ths notes played around the drums, with one hand. It’s easy enough that most drummers should be able to learn it well enough to play the page straight down in […]
Crossing accents
This very simple idea occurred to me while I was working on an Elvin Jones transcription today— either I had an insight into an underlying concept in his playing, or I was just daydreaming. What […]
RLB sticking applied
This is that previous right/left/bass sticking applied to Exercise 9 from Ted Reeds’s Syncopation (p. 45 in the old edition). The entire piece follows that sticking, except for a couple of spots. I’ve written in […]
Syncopation, Lesson 4, in 5/4
This is really a library piece— I use pp. 10-11 from Syncopation (that’s Lesson 4 in the new edition) so many different ways that I wanted to put it into 5/4. We’ll be referring to […]
Dotted-quarter cymbal in 5/4 — two measures
We seem to be having a little bit of an early Christmas/Saturnalia with all of these downloads, as I make up for a slow November. This is yet another extension of one of the Elvin […]
A sticking experiment
I don’t know where I’m going with this idea, but what the hell, if a blog isn’t the place to throw up whatever half-baked junk you happen to be fiddling with at the moment… Here […]
Several ideas in 5/4
Nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but this came up today while I was working on Mevlevia, an ECM-type tune in a moderate 5. I’ve taken some basic patterns in 5/8, and applied them to a usable […]
Cascara coordination — 01
OK, I am seriously in need of a break from working on the book— finishing the damn thing is always the hardest. So here’s a page of exercises for developing coordination with the cascara, a […]