It’s a thing with Brazilian drumset drummers to play really fast, even singles on the cymbal with one hand when playing samba; here Adam Osmianski has posted an excellent roundup of stuff on the technique […]
Category: technique
Cymbal technique for Brazilian styles
It’s kind of a thing among Brazilian drummers to be able to play really blazing singles on the cymbal with the right hand, when playing a samba. Drummers in the modern American tradition— or maybe […]
Snare drum workout in 4/4
Working out of Buster Bailey’s snare drum book Wrist Twisters— one of the great books of technical snare drum studies, by the way— I came across a simple pattern I liked, and I wrote up […]
Very occasional quote of the day: “You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
A pull from Ethan Iverson’s Whiplash/Buddy article, which deserves its own space: A story about Mel Lewis: Mel hated giving lessons, but finally a kid talked him into letting him come by a record session […]
VOQOTD: Dejohnette on chops
The first of many valuable things I’m sure we’ll be mining from the Percussive Notes archives. Here Jack Dejohnette, interviewed by Charlie Perry, says something we hopefully already knew, but which bears repeating: P: You […]
Gladstone (et al) method for Stick Control
I stumbled across this piece of drumming lore, posted in 2006 on the Drummerworld discussion forum: Billy Gladstone’s way of practicing Stick Control. According to a guy posting anonymously on the Internet. It does sound […]
More technique
This is one of the more memorable quotes from the pianist Kenny Werner’s book Effortless Mastery— I think a lot of people noticed it, and fully embraced it: Once after playing a concert an interviewer […]
Survival chops: right hand lead
This is the second in an extremely short series covering the bare essentials of what you need for “drumistic” fill, variation, and solo material across a variety of styles— you can read the intro to […]
Crossing accents
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 […]
Pad practice caveat
As someone who comes from the land of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, and the rest of that nightmare, it’s kind of quaintly Canadian that he calls this a “rant”, but Ted Warren says something […]