Ever wonder how to play a 3:4:5:6 polyrhythm? Well, here you go: Those are the kinds of questions people ask at music.stack.exchange, where I’ve been visiting recently. It’s somewhat refreshingly fact oriented— it’s heavily moderated […]
Category: polymeter
Metric modulation a la Silverman – 01
A student brought in a copy of Chuck Silverman’s Practical Applications: Afro-Caribbean Rhythms for Drum Set, and we worked through a part of it together, dealing with metric modulations— or more accurately superimposed metric modulations […]
Hemiola basics – UPDATED
On the sage advice of a fifth grade student, I’ve revised this old page introducing the 3:2 polyrhythm, or hemiola. I’ve added a few variations and inversions, added stickings and syllables for counting… and deleted […]
Meter-within-meter: 5/8 in 4/4 rock – 01
This is something inspired by Joey Baron’s playing on Bill Frisell’s Child At Heart— I always come back to the same few things, and that’s a particularly fertile, mainly simple, piece of drumming. Some of […]
Groove o’ the day: Tony Williams — Footprints
Here’s a Latin-style groove Tony Williams plays at one point in the odyssey of jazz percussion that is Footprints, a tune by Wayne Shorter, from Miles Davis’s album Miles Smiles. The tune is in 6/4, […]
More meter-within-meter phrases
Here’s a little supplement to the meter-within-meter introduction of a few days ago: some additional two, four, and eight measure practice phrases: It’s easy to get yourself into trouble with this, so it’s important 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 […]
Coordination with a dotted-quarter cymbal pattern, in 5/4 — part 1
Extending this recent series of Dahlgren & Fine/Elvin-style coordination studies a bit further, here’s part one of the dotted quarter series, converted into 5/4: Swing the 8th notes and do the tom moves when you […]
Coordination with a dotted-quarter cymbal pattern – part 2
Here’s part two of our series of Elvin-esque four way coordination in a waltz feel, with a dotted-quarter note cymbal rhythm. Here the bass drum is in unison with the cymbal, and it’s a little […]
Coordination with a dotted-quarter cymbal pattern – part 1
There’s got to be a better title for that, but I don’t know what it is. Frankly, I’m just lucky if I can get anything posted at all at this point. Here we’re looking at […]
Four in three in four in 4/4
This an item inspired by Elvin Jones’ rolling triplet thing, written by my friend Stephen Pancerev- we just spent an afternoon rifling through his notebooks of original exercises, cryptic scribblings, etc, and this is the […]
Something key
Jon McCaslin presents a very core principle of modern jazz drumming, via a lesson from Alan Dawson. The 3/8-within-4/4 polyrhythm has been present in a variety of forms in jazz since the beginning, and became […]