I’ve written many more pages of Gary Chaffee-style linear phrases than actually appear in his books— people have gotten incredibly good just using what’s in the books, but they work better for me when changed around […]
Category: triplets
Studio triplet feel
Here’s a set of basic patterns for making a 70s-style triplet groove, or a moderate, triplety, shuffle,, as you hear on songs like Isn’t She Lovely, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You, […]
Survival chops: triplets in 5/4
Part of the idea of this “survival” series is to be very right hand (or leading hand, if you play lefty) oriented; we want to start every measure with the right hand— it just suits […]
Snare drum workout in 6/8
I’m all about the one-page workouts these days, so here’s another one, for snare drum, in 6/8. The first goal is just to be able to play each of the patterns individually; probably some of […]
Exercises for developing a common Reed interpretation
Following up on the Key to right hand accented triplets post, here is a set of exercises for getting my recommended stickings together: Get the pdf
Key to right hand accented triplets using Syncopation
There’s a very common interpretation used with Ted Reed’s Syncopation: the right hand plays the melody line, swinging the 8th notes, and the left hand fills out the triplets— hopefully everyone has heard of that […]
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 […]
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 […]
Three Camps: all inversions in one
I was trying to work this up on the fly at the drum set, and it wasn’t happening, and I needed to write it out– so here we are. This is a slightly more practical […]
Inversions of Three Camps
So I have basically a one-track mind. Maybe a two-track mind. Three closely-related tracks. Right now it’s all the Elvin waltz and Three Camps. What we have here is a little thing I improvised while […]
Todd’s Methods, Pt. 2: triplet partials in Syncopation
The second in a series of quick, sketchily-outlined demonstrations of my practice methods. Here I give a couple of my variations on common ways of using Ted Reed’s Syncopation. If you’ve worked with that book […]