The early 80s were kind of a heyday for hip hihat work. Stewart Copeland and Omar Hakim, really got my attention for that, anyway. Can two great players make a heyday? You decide. Here’s Hakim’s […]
Category: grooves
Double bass drum: 5 and 7 stroke singles
A student request. This is the first thing I’ve ever written for double bass in my life— I don’t play it, it’s not my thing. It doesn’t matter. This page of exercises will work for […]
Orchestrating and embellishing backbeats
What do we do with this? Someone bored with playing backbeats all night asked this question on the Drummerworld forum: “What do you do to spice up the 2 & 4?” My answer is: I […]
Basic funk ideas: four iterations – 03
Another page of this modern funk method— we’re going to need a better name for this thing, as we’re getting well beyond basic. This is turning into quite an epic. Normally, working on fairly demanding […]
Basic funk ideas: four iterations – 01
A companion to our Basic funk with mixed stickings page from the other day. Here we take that same set of patterns, run them through some standard funk/fusion orchestrations, and learn to transition smoothly between […]
Grooves o’ the day: three street beats by Fred Staehle
Kicking off a little series on playing New Orleans-style street beats, here are some grooves by Fred Staehle. These are from Dr. John’s Gumbo, a very famous album of classic New Orleans tunes, recorded by, […]
Grooves o’ the day: all the grooves from Look-ka Py Py
Let’s do a whole record for the groove of the day— and a very famous one at that: Look-Ka Py Py, by The Meters. The drummer is Zigaboo Modeliste, the New Orleans funk legend. We’ve […]
Groove o’ the day: Elvin Jones – Rose Marie
Something from the record I’ve been running in my car all week: The Peacocks, by Stan Getz and Jimmy Rowles. The tune is Rose Marie, a song from the 20s which was a country hit […]
Groove o’ the day: Elvin Jones – Zoltan
Wow, we’ve done a lot on Elvin Jones. And why not— everyone loves his playing, and wants to play like him at some point. I should put all of this into a single volume print […]
GOTD & POC: Elvin Jones — That 5/4 Bag
First-ever combined Groove o’ the Day and Page o’ Coordination. We’re completely off the chain. From Elvin Jones’s second album as leader, Dear John C., here is the major groove for That 5/4 Bag, with […]
Rock beats displaced
You’re not going to be seeing much of me for a few days— I’m getting married tomorrow, I’ve got a pre-wedding party today, then a micro-honeymoon at the Oregon coast Wednesday through Friday (the real […]