There’s a quote from Elvin Jones where he described his process of selecting cymbals: he would go to the Gretsch warehouse in Brooklyn where the imported K. Zildjians were kept, and he would grab a […]
Year: 2018
Back from tour
school hang in Dresden I’m back from Germany and am deep in the throes of jet lag and a bad cold, and will resume normal posting soon. I had a really great time meeting, hanging […]
Transcription: Roberto Silva – Ana Maria
First, a service announcement: I’m heading to Germany in a couple of days, so posting will be rather light. I’ll be visiting some teachers and drummers in Berlin and Dresden, and showing them some Cymbal […]
Page o’ coordination: basic jazz waltz – 02
Another page of basic jazz waltz materials, with a dotted-quarter note rhythm on the bass drum, which gives your waltz a more rolling feel. As opposed to the traditional, rather hokey boom-tap-tap feel. Play the […]
VOQOTD: Jon Christensen on technique
From Jon Christensen’s Modern Drummer feature in the early 80s: MD: What makes a drummer interesting to you? What do you look for? JC: Having watched a lot of drummers over the years, you can […]
Open ratamacues – 01
Anyone know what the story is with ratamacues? I don’t get it. Why a ruff on a 16th note triplet? As a fundamental sticking pattern they’re ungainly, and as musical vocabulary they’re ill-defined, tensionless blobs […]
Hell of notes
I want to talk about my own playing a little bit. Here’s an item from a little free-jazz show with Portland musicians Ryan Meagher and Noah Simpson a couple of nights ago: What is going […]
Mel Lewis on rub-a-dub
Loren Schoenberg, who conducted the famous Mel Lewis history of jazz drumming interviews, has begun posting excerpts from the interviews on his YouTube page. Which is lucky, because I think the source from which I […]
Accents in 5/4 – mixed rhythm – 01
Exhibit A for why we keep writing. I was practicing yesterday, and I thought hmmm I want to work on this one thing, and out the thousands of pages of drumming materials in my studio, […]
Drum technique magical nihilist death cult
Submitted without comment, excerpts from an internet forum conversation on drumming speed training “protocols.” “When are you considered to have truly ‘mastered’ a given tempo? For example, I could continually play 16th notes at 250bpm […]