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 […]
Category: exercises
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 […]
First lesson in 5/4 — swing feel
A rare two-pager today. Here I’ve put a little flesh on the bones on the process I outlined in my earlier Cracking 5/4 series, with an easy first lesson coordinating snare drum and bass drum […]
More Stick Control in 5/4
Another way of using Stick Control in 5/4 came up in my practicing recently, as I was working on Mevlevia. What I’ve done is change the rhythm to three beats of 8th notes and two […]
Basic paradiddle funk
Man, there’s just a whole lot of stuff besides blogging on my mind lately— like a Europe tour and recording project— so we may not see a lot of hugely substantive posts in the coming […]
Todd’s waltz — two measure phrase
Well, we should all have developed a pretty crushing medium-tempo waltz by the time we’re done here. Elaborating on my earlier “Todd’s waltz” piece— so-called (by me alone) because I don’t very often hear this […]