Minor item, corralling some similar sticking ideas that have been floating around the site. I noticed that with paradiddle-like stickings, I like inverting them so the double is up front, right after the first accent. […]
Category: snare drum
Three camps: four variations
Four alternative ways of playing the rudimental piece Three Camps, that I’m practicing this week, accented 5 stroke rolls, flam accents, flam drags, and flammed 5s. Learn each measure individually, then play them in the form […]
From the zone: SD chops
Another notebook item from the later 80s, as I get my act together following recent personal developments. Cleaning out my mom’s basement, I found a bunch of my old notebooks and music materials. Basically, I’ve […]
From the zone: left hand developer
Here’s a cool little exercise from a great drummer from Los Angeles, Sinclair Lott: You can see what’s happening there— a table of time with a RLL sticking, with accents on the downbeats. Which makes […]
Best books: revisiting Rubank
The matte industrial looking horizon blue cover has that depression era band room reek. A fresh look at the very old, very turgid Rubank drum method books. Rubank, a series of method books for all […]
Three Camps in 3
A few practice items coming up. Here’s the traditional rudimental item Three Camps converted into 3/4 time, two different ways— accenting the quarter notes, or accenting the swing dotted half notes. That latter is harder […]
Cinquillodiddles
This one occurred to me thinking about Wilby Fletcher playing with McCoy Tyner… The cinquillo rhythm— I’m calling it that now for ease of reference— is a very useful one measure Latin rhythm, and a common […]
Triplets to paradiddles
A brief set of exercises illustrating the similarity of alternating triplets and paradiddle inversions. We want connections between things that seem different, even when there’s a seeming hard mathematical difference, like between a triplet and […]
Stick control in 12/8 – “Afro logic”
Here’s what that page of 6/8 sticking patterns was setting up— and that funny joke photoshopped page from Stone: sticking combinations in 12/8, oriented like the Afro “short bell” rhythm, with one pattern on beats […]
Stick control patterns in 6/8
This is part of a larger writing project I’m doing— some things you have to write out to decide if they’re going to be of any use. You can see that the logical sequence here […]
Stick Control with short bell logic
Another one of my little photoshop gags— I edited a jpeg of the first page of exercises in Stick Control to follow the logic of the Afro “short bell” pattern*, which has beats 1 and 4 […]
An Elvin-inspired lick
A page inspired by something that came up on Elvin Jones’s solo on the tune Crisis, which I partially transcribed last week. It’s not even a lick, it’s something funny that happened with his timing, […]