UPDATE: I added some video of me practicing this. I’ve been practicing my fast tempos lately, both with sticks and brushes. I’m talking about jazz, tempos above ~290 bpm. I haven’t had to do a […]
Category: uptempo methods
Uptempo drill a la Riley
Major rehash alert: an uptempo jazz drill I was playing yesterday, using what John Riley once called “my C major scale”: an SSBB pattern in 8th notes, with notes omitted. The page below is very […]
Three Camps for drumset – jazz / uptempo – 01
I wrote this to isolate some things used in my main uptempo Reed method— which I continue to find an excellent method. This is good if you need to polish a few of those bass drum patterns […]
Latest uptempo drill
I’ll be honest, most of my uptempo things I improvise while practicing, and then work on them maybe a few times over a week or two. But taken together, they give you more than a […]
Reed interpretations: new uptempo method
All right, I found the way to use Reed at faster jazz tempos. My “the way”, anyhow. I’ve mostly been winging my uptempo jazz comping until now— I never had materials I really liked for […]
Syncopation exercise: two notes per measure – 01
Another syncopation exercise written with a special set of parameters— this one just has two notes per measure, with quarter note or greater spacing. Last year I did a page of one-line exercises that way. This […]
Uptempo bailout drill
I’m not great at playing superfast tempos. I can sound really good at the magic Roy Haynes tempo (half note = 143, which sounds very cooking to normal people), with diminishing results as we get […]
EZ uptempo jazz method – 01
There is at least one other EZ uptempo jazz method— oh look, here’s another one— but this one is first in a series of similar things I’m writing now. If you learn to be creative […]
EZ Tony-like method: two variations
We’re calling this “Tony Williams-like” on the thinnest possible pretext, of course— playing it, it reminded me of some things he did on Frelon Brun, is all. These are two even easier things you can […]
Stone method for uptempo jazz — 01
Most of the regular drumming literature is poorly adapted to the special conditions of very fast tempos in jazz; the practice materials are either too dense, or are triplet-based, which obviously isn’t going to work. […]