A little thing I improvised while warming up for a rehearsal. All my rock stuff is oriented around getting off the hihat, getting both hands moving around the drums. A lot of students get locked […]
Category: rock
How to stop – 01
Kind of a mundane item here— a multi-parter, believe it or not— mainly for teachers, about handling ordinary materials in a more real-life musical way, including how to stop in the conversation. Younger students and […]
EZ fast rock – 02
The first EZ fast rock page was a hit with my students, so here’s another like it, more in a fill/variation direction. Combining patterns to make two-measure phrases, most of these will be the second […]
Updated rock loops
Here is a link for my updated collection of rock loops, which I put together for one of my students. These should be easy for most people to play along with— no weird rhythms or […]
Beats to fills
Here’s a connecter idea, using some rock beats written normally, a la Funky Primer, but playing them as cymbal accents with fills, as in this rock fill drill— hitting accents on the cymbal/bass drum, and […]
EZ tom ruff phrases
Here are some more practice phrase ideas for the tom ruffs. This is an underrated item, it should be a lot of fun. Rock out. As the stickings on patterns 1 and 2 indicate, when […]
Rock fills with Reed – 01
Bringing these recent right hand lead Reed tweaks into some basic day to day rock vocabulary. I’ll illustrate these using the tom ruffs we looked at recently— try them with any of the other things […]
Reed tweak: alternating cymbals on rock drill
Incrementalism is the word du jour around here— lately we’ve been all about supplementing/altering some basic Reed systems in small ways, to make a living, evolving thing out of it, and not just pure formula. […]
EZ rock in 5 – 3+2
Extending this EZ fast rock / rock in 3 series, with quarter notes on the cymbal: here are some beats and ideas in 5, phrased 3+2. I wrote this series to illustrate the difference between […]
EZ Rock in 3/4
Working on my EZ Fast Rock page, a younger student asked a question like what’s the difference between playing in 3, 4, or 5? Well, here we go, some similar stuff written in 3/4. I like […]
EZ Fast Rock Lesson
This page functions both as a page of easy stuff for beginners, and as basic vocabulary for fast-tempo rock drumming. There are a lot of patterns, deliberately. This’ll be many students’ first shot at processing […]