Just a couple of solo 4s from Art Blakey, from the 1953 Miles Davis 10-inch release, Vol. 3. You’ll most likely find it on a later Blue Note compilation. The tune is Well, You Needn’t. […]
Author: Todd Bishop
Reed method: bass drum with quarter note triplet filler – key
See, this is what I’m talking about— writing/organizing materials a certain way, you get practice ideas you wouldn’t have gotten just practicing the books. I could have used this 30 years ago, but it came […]
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 […]
Very occasional quote of the day: the point of doing things
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to […]
Another set of patterns for improvisation
File this in the same category as the recent “extended shuffle” stickings page— it’s a unified set of patterns based on a simple idea, organized to make them easy to improvise with. They’re not new […]
Listening and loops for jazz students
For my jazz students, here is a list of much loved, mainstream, historically important recordings to listen to in your first few years of learning. I’m also in the process of updating the practice loop […]
Three Camps for drum set – inverted – 05
Another page working on normal jazz drumset vocabulary using Three Camps— we’re sort of inverting the basic version, except I’ve taken a few liberties with it to make a normal Elvin-like texture out of it. I […]
A great jazz ride cymbal
This question was asked on a drumming forum: “What makes a great ride cymbal?” I answered it for jazz cymbals specifically, because that’s what interests me, and that’s the music where the ride cymbal […]
Beginning of the end
Well, that was the longest week of my life. I’m still recovering, and after I’ve recovered I probably won’t want to write about this. I hope everyone is celebrating the electoral defeat of the most […]
Stick Control patterns for a certain type of funk
A thing we do here is to rewrite/re-organize existing materials to make them better for practicing certain things. I hate hunting around the page while I practice, flipping pages, dodging things that are no good […]