One of my students, age 12, accidentally invented a really good way of handling the right hand lead Reed system. You have to watch out for things like that. Sometimes mistakes point to a better […]
Category: Reed tweaks
Reed tweak: RH lead triplets – fast within slow
This has been an item of interest for a long time— playing fast in a slow tempo. In a master class Peter Erskine mentioned that Jack Dejohnette was the only drummer he knew who could […]
Double time Reed tweak: one step beyond
Launching to the outer limits of what you can reasonably do with Syncopation, verging on losing the melody rhythm as a point of reference. Or not, see what you make of it. Using one of […]
More on that double timing tweak…
Clarifying the method behind that Reed tweak from last week, double timing the very familiar, friendly, happy, easy RH lead Reed system— RH plays book rhythm on a cymbal + bass drum in unison, LH […]
Reed tweaks: double timing RH lead
A collection of warmups for adding 16th notes to our good friend the right hand lead Reed system. You can work them up to practice them while reading from Syncopation, or these could be your […]
Reed tweak: RH lead with single cym / flam
Yet another right hand lead Reed tweak— YART, or YARHLRT, for short. It’s a little convoluted, but works out a slightly different thing from the other systems/tweaks we’ve done, and I think it’s worthwhile. The […]
Reed tweak: linear fill in another setting
A similar item to another recent thing, with a Reed system I use pretty often, but don’t talk about much— with the hands plaing the book rhythm, and the bass drum filling in the spaces. […]
Reed tweak: filling in 16ths – 02
Boy, if you’re not doing all my Reed stuff, you’re really missing out. These things square away a ton of stuff that people generally have to put together piecemeal— I had to do that. Figure […]
Reed tweak: filling in 16ths
Another in this endless series of tweaks to a basic RH lead system, commonly associated with the book Progressive Steps to Syncopation, by Ted Reed. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Let’s be clear, I am […]
Reed tweak: BRL linear fill
Fun little item here, modifying the straight 8th right hand lead system commonly applied to the book Syncopation. Where there are two or more 8ths of left hand filler, we’ll play 16ths, starting with a […]
Reed tweak: RH lead with LH drags
Reedtweakapalooza continues! I really need to round these up in a book. This is yet another thing to do with the straight 8th right hand lead Reed system. Refreshing your memory on that: reading from […]
Reed tweak: RH lead triplets – five stroke rolls
This is where my thinking is going lately, towards breaking up some Reed practice systems so they’re not pure formula. Which I have always done anyway, just not very systematically. We want to make our […]