I guess there’s no getting around it: we’re all about the 6/8 these days— there’s a whole bunch more of this on deck. This is a Chuck Kerrigan syncopation exercise, from his very useful Syncopated […]
Category: reading
Good reading
Ignore the model’s bad posture, tucked-in muscle shirt, and Bay City Rollers hairdo, and buy the book. If you’ve worked with Ted Reed’s Syncopation in any serious way you’ve probably sensed that it has a […]
Writing drum charts
I just happened across a couple of nice posts on how to write a drum chart— that is, a handwritten page of notes sketching out whatever information you need to play through a song or […]
More with rock beats using Syncopation
Going a little further with my earlier piece on making rock beats using— say it with me— Ted Reed’s Syncopation. In doing this, there will be many duplicate beats, but that’s not important— our purpose […]
Rudimental Reed: five stroke rolls
I’ve been fooling around with applying some rudiments to the long exercises in Syncopation, by Ted Reed. We’ll start humbly with it, converting the written quarter notes (and tied 8ths) to untied rolls– an 8th […]
Several big band drumming books
A couple of new/old big band drumming books dropped into my lap recently, so what the heck, I thought I’d round them up for you: Studio & Big Band Drumming by Steve Houghton – 1985 […]
Getting lost
Or not. Here are a few pointers on a subject with which I am all too intimately familiar: getting lost while soloing over over a form, and while reading: SOLOING First, whatever various hells break […]
Big band figure builder
Here’s another installment of a thing I’ve been doing with several students, using Syncopation lesson 4 to get familiar with the basic moves and reading associated with setting up and kicking big band figures (“cutting” […]
Syncopation exercise – Solar
No big woop here, I just happened to need a fairly sparse syncopation exercise, so I wrote this up quickly, and I thought I’d share it. It’s based on the tune Solar, by Miles Davis. […]
16th note fills using Syncopation – part 2
Here’s part 2 of my method for practicing 16th note fills using Syncopation. The goal is to practice reading interpretively, and also to give you a framework for working on the timing of your fills […]
16th note fills using Syncopation – Part 1
This is the first part of a method for working on 16th note fills, which I developed for my intermediate students. It requires some selective reading, but in a constructive way- the same type of […]