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 […]
Category: reading
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 […]