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 […]
Category: snare drum
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, […]
10 and 11 stroke rolls in Wilcoxon’s Rolling In Rhythm – continued
Continuing with this nerdly topic of problems with roll notation in Charley Wilcoxon’s book Rolling In Rhythm; it should have been the authoritative book on rudimental rolls, but is compromised at times by some very […]
Accents in Reed
TOTAL nerd stuff here. I use the accent pages in Progressive Steps to Syncopation (pp. 47-49) with my students for convenience, but I find them be a pain. They’re thorough, but poorly balanced— so if […]
A little technique video
Let’s talk more about me. I just posted a little technique video in response to a forum conversation. Someone was confused about the meanings of the stroke types, and wanted evidence of my competency to […]
New rudiment: Swisscues
New rudiment time: a flam rudiment combining a Swiss Triplet and a Flamacue. It’s so basic I can’t imagine it doesn’t already exist somewhere, but I’m not digging through the lists of 50,000 hybrid rudiments […]