Here’s a loop that be real useful to a lot of people, sampled from Soulful Brothers, from Kenny Burrell’s record Blues – The Common Ground. The drummer is Grady Tate, and he’s playing a shuffle […]
Category: shuffle
Half time funk shuffle – 01
Here’s a page for my students, working through the basics of a half time funk shuffle groove. It gets mentioned a lot more online than it comes up in real life, but it’s a thing. […]
Listening to Blue Mitchell
Put on your headphones, here’s a little listening this morning: this is Blues On My Mind from Blue Mitchell’s album Out Of The Blue. A lot of blue there, and blues. Playing on it are […]
Reed interpretations: triplet feel R&B
This is a triplet-feel R&B groove practice method we did in a lesson with a student recently. It has a snare drum backbeat on 2 and 4, quarter notes on the cymbal, and some triplet […]
Three Camps for drumset: Funk shuffle – 01
Another page of Three Camps interpretations for drumset, based on a 4/4 funk shuffle groove, with a normal jazz rhythm on the cymbal. These focus on pretty normal vocabulary for that type of thing. I […]
Listening to Ray Bryant
“I used to be a free jazz drummer, now I just want to play tight arrangements.” — me a few years ago That’s not 100% true, but I’ve learned a lot of respect for the […]
Listening: Art Blakey groove number
Let’s do some more guided listening. Here’s Art Blakey playing a little Quincy Jones groove arrangement with a nine piece ensemble: Plenty, Plenty Soul, from the Milt Jackson album of the same title. The form […]
Practice loop: slow blues
Here’s a loop you’re going to need this week, as I finish writing the 6/8 prep for my patented(?) Harmonic Coordination Improved™ method. Sampled from Melvin Sparks’s Blues for JB, the tempo is a stately […]
Practice loop: Lopsy Lu – complete form
This replaces my earlier practice loop sampled from Stanley Clarke’s Lopsy Lu— this one has the whole form of the tune. Nice to actually know how to play it, just in case you ever play […]
Page o’ coordination: Midnight Special shuffle
Page o’ coordination based on the Midnight Special shuffle groove as played by Grady Tate and Donald Bailey with Jimmy Smith. We’re using two different cymbal rhythms, and the snare drum part varies, but the […]
Page o’ coordination: Jabo shuffle
If you watched that video of Jabo Starks playing with John Scofield et al, you’ll notice that he does some hip stuff on the bell of the cymbal behind the trombone during the bridge between […]
5/8 accents in a triplet feel
I’ve worked on triplets and */8 feels a lot in my 35+ years playing the drums, and played a lot of music in the style, and still there’s a certain type of shuffle or 12/8 […]