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 […]
Category: funk
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 […]
Groove o’ the day: Andy Newmark – Dreamweaver
UPDATE: Download link is active now! I really think people don’t know what groove is any more— I heard the worst thing in the world on the radio* a few days ago, and I WISH […]
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 […]
Stick Control patterns for a certain type of funk
A thing we do here is to rewrite/re-organize existing materials to make them better for practicing certain things. I hate hunting around the page while I practice, flipping pages, dodging things that are no good […]
Best books: Jim Payne’s Complete Funk Drumming Book
I’ve long felt there isn’t a truly good basic funk drumming book. There are many bad ones, and a few decent/acceptable ones. I most often use A Funky Primer out of habit, or Joel Rothman’s […]
Transcription: Shelly Manne – What Laurie Likes
Here’s Shelly Manne playing a funk jam— What Laurie Likes, by Art Pepper, from Pepper’s album Living Legend. This is really just to get you to listen to Charlie Haden— that’s a bassist— who is […]
Reed tweak: adding flams to a basic method
This is a small tweak on a common funk practice method for Ted Reed’s Syncopation, adding flams to the method in which the right hand plays the book rhythm on a cymbal, and the left […]
Todd’s methods: accents to funk
This is an item for teachers, I suppose. It’s good to have more than one way of teaching things. There’s no reason for a student to have to struggle with something just because your preferred […]
Hemiola funk series: S3B
Another variation on the hemiola funk thing, with the main pattern ending with a double on the bass drum— a snare hit + 3 bass hits. I continue to tweak the basic template to cover […]
Hemiola funk series: Funky Primer – p. 22
Here’s an easy little thing, bringing together two funk items: I’ve taken a familiar page from Charles Dowd’s Funky Primer, and re-written it with the patterns used in my hemiola funk series. You know what […]
Four on the floor drill – 01
This is a little lightweight thing that came out of practicing along with that recent Fela Kuti loop. I was playing four on the floor in a half time feel, with some variations on the […]