For one of my students, a new page of warmups introducing an Afro 6 groove— or various forms of it. It’s as deep a thing as there is in drumming, and to begin understanding it […]
Category: grooves
Funk warmups – cymbal on offbeats
A page of groove fragments, really, for one of my students— to help get oriented working out of New Breed. We were having some difficulties with this particular cymbal rhythm. You could play this […]
EZ 8th note groove with Stick Control
A simple 8th note groove sequence using the book Stick Control, played on the drum set. Use Stick Control pp. 5-7, or my page of sticking patterns, which I think is in a better order. […]
Groove o’ the day: Max In Tunisia
A selection of grooves played by Max Roach on the Miles Davis album At Last!— a live recording made at The Lighthouse in LA in 1953, and released thirty years later. Max here has been […]
Groove o’ the day: Idris Muhammad boogaloo
A light little 60s pop beat by Idris Muhammad— I don’t know what to call it, part boogaloo, part bossa nova— from George Benson’s album Shape Of Things To Come. The whole record is like […]
New Breed tweak – left hand cymbal accents
Getting through a single system from The New Breed takes some time, longer than I want to have one hand be basically idle, playing just the 2 and 4. Let’s give it more to do. […]
EZ fast rock – 02
The first EZ fast rock page was a hit with my students, so here’s another like it, more in a fill/variation direction. Combining patterns to make two-measure phrases, most of these will be the second […]
Tresillo unit – 02
Here’s an addendum to a set of stuff I posted back in January— the “tresillo unit.” That was basically a set of variations on a New Breed system. This is a loosely organized collection of […]
Straight 8ths in funk Afro 12/8
Something I’m working out, that needed to be written out to do it: straight 8ths on the bass drum within a funk-style Afro 12/8 groove. I work a lot with this whole area of groove. […]
Elvinized Mozambique
An item I was working out with a student— making an Elvin Jones-like Latin groove/texture out of a Mozambique rhythm, for medium tempos, with swing 8th notes. It’s an entry, just the first, most obvious […]
Tresillo unit
For a couple of weeks I’ve been working with an area of stuff covering several different styles— grooves with a tresillo rhythm, or part of it, in the bass drum. I’ve been polishing it for […]