This very simple idea occurred to me while I was working on an Elvin Jones transcription today— either I had an insight into an underlying concept in his playing, or I was just daydreaming. What […]
Category: Ted Reed
RLB sticking applied
This is that previous right/left/bass sticking applied to Exercise 9 from Ted Reeds’s Syncopation (p. 45 in the old edition). The entire piece follows that sticking, except for a couple of spots. I’ve written in […]
Syncopation, Lesson 4, in 5/4
This is really a library piece— I use pp. 10-11 from Syncopation (that’s Lesson 4 in the new edition) so many different ways that I wanted to put it into 5/4. We’ll be referring to […]
A sticking experiment
I don’t know where I’m going with this idea, but what the hell, if a blog isn’t the place to throw up whatever half-baked junk you happen to be fiddling with at the moment… Here […]
Alan Dawson’s “Ruff Bossa”
We’re laying it on pretty thick with the Reed interpretations right now, but I just went over this with a student, so I need to put up one more. It’s a swing interpretation with partially […]
Rudimental Reed: ruffs
Today’s Rudimental Reed entry is pretty straightforward— just make a ruff out of any note that doesn’t have an (untied) 8th note before it. That’s an awkward way of phrasing it, but I think you’ll […]
Rudimental Reed: paradiddles
Another entry in our “Rudimental Reed” series, in which we outline some methods for apply rudiments to the long exercises in Ted Reed’s Syncopation, this time using paradiddles. Here’s that well-known opening line from the […]
Half-time feel rock using Syncopation
Extending my previous series on making rock/pop beats using Ted Reed’s Syncopation, here is a way of making a half time feel using the same concept, except we play quarter notes on the hihat, and […]
Houghton’s triplets
From Steve Houghton’s book Studio and Big Band Drumming, here’s an alternate sticking method for making triplets out of Syncopation. For most people the most familiar method is to play the melody notes— the written […]
Rudimental Reed: five stroke rolls
I’ve been fooling around with applying some rudiments to the long exercises in Syncopation, by Ted Reed. We’ll start humbly with it, converting the written quarter notes (and tied 8ths) to untied rolls– an 8th […]
Stick Control implied rhythms
I hope you dig all of this Stick Control stuff; I just happen to be working with this book a lot right now. One of my reservations I’ve always had about it- about the way […]
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 […]