A background project lately has been to create some ways of practicing feathering the bass drum as part of a modern, varying, organic jazz texture. This page is related to some things I’m hearing in […]
Category: exercises
Syncopation exercise: Accents from Chasin’ the Train – 01
Companion to yesterday’s post: a syncopation exercise based on part 5 of the Chasin’ the Trane transcription— all of the accents played on the snare and bass drum. As usual I’ve followed the Reed convention […]
Hemiola funk series: all basic patterns in 3/8
UPDATE: Download link works now! There’s an ongoing political crisis happening in the United States right now, and it’s really hard to write, or do anything else productive. It’s very serious and basically every human […]
Hemiola funk series: all patterns combined
Continuing to work through the possibilities of the hemiola funk series, in hopes of eventually making a concise, coherent method out of it. It has been great for my students— adult beginners, and kids under […]
Bass drum rhythms for feathering
I wrote this up after listening to Mel Lewis’s history of jazz drumming tapes, where he was raving about the importance of playing time on the bass drum (he really gets into it after 43:30). He […]
Three Camps for drum set – inverted quarter note triplet fill – 07
I’m telling you this is a good system. It gives you the thing, some basic variations on it, starting on 1 or 2, straight and syncopated, and it makes you do it for as long […]
Page o’ coordination: jazz / RLRR
Working on this Elvin project the last couple of days, I noticed that, similar to Max Roach on another recording, he plays the snare drum in the gap in the cymbal rhythm a lot, for […]
Three Camps for drum set – quarter note triplet fill – 06
I started doing these because I wanted a composed drill, like Alan Dawson’s Rudimental Ritual, that I would actually play. It has worked out really well. This entry is the same as the first one, […]
Three Camps for drumset: Funk shuffle – 01
Another page of Three Camps interpretations for drumset, based on a 4/4 funk shuffle groove, with a normal jazz rhythm on the cymbal. These focus on pretty normal vocabulary for that type of thing. I […]
Reed method: bass drum with quarter note triplet filler – key
See, this is what I’m talking about— writing/organizing materials a certain way, you get practice ideas you wouldn’t have gotten just practicing the books. I could have used this 30 years ago, but it came […]
Syncopation exercise: two notes per measure – 01
Another syncopation exercise written with a special set of parameters— this one just has two notes per measure, with quarter note or greater spacing. Last year I did a page of one-line exercises that way. This […]
Another set of patterns for improvisation
File this in the same category as the recent “extended shuffle” stickings page— it’s a unified set of patterns based on a simple idea, organized to make them easy to improvise with. They’re not new […]