A small complaint on genre in music, that has been hanging around my drafts folder a long time. Whenever I’m slow to write any new stuff, and am desperate for content, I dump one of […]
Category: styles
Feel and style
Just a brief discussion of the musical terms feel and style. In normal professional musician usage they are often interchangeable, referring to the type of accompaniment to be played by the rhythm section. What kind of a […]
Snare drummers vs. drum set players
This came up in the Neil Peart piece: the idea of snare drummers as opposed to drum set players. People who play the drums as a single four limb instrument vs. people who are essentially […]
Page o’ coordination: Cinquillo
Here’s an easy page o’ coordination based on a basic bell rhythm, known in Latin music circles as “cinquillo”— which basically means quintuplet. It’s not a quintuplet, it’s the indicated 5-note rhythm, but that’s what […]
Drumming myths
A decent piece from the Modern Drummer site— 12 Drumming Myths Debunked. Here are the entries that interest me, with my comments on them: 2. Mistakes are always bad. Honor thy mistakes with repetition—I think […]
Hot takes: 49 Styles Every Drummer MUST KNOW!!!
Not a cha cha. Not anything. Note: The random Internet-sourced written example to the left is included for comedic purposes only. Do not learn. Groove not good. I was flipping through an old copy of […]
Afro 6/8 with a backbeat
In my day we didn’t have fancy drum blogs giving us near-daily pages of nicely formatted, well-thought-out drum exercises free of charge. Our teachers just scribbled something in the margin of our tattered copy of […]
A crash course in the ECM feel
Look for the photos with water and the Helvetica font. The “ECM feel”, as it’s now being called, is a style that evolved in the late 1960’s and 70’s, and has since become one of […]
Survival tips for cruise ship drummers
My man Willie Blair, the only person I know who could get away with flouting most of the non-musical rules. I guess I had to actually write about drumming on cruise ships at some point, […]