“Coordination is a nice thing to have going, don’t get me wrong. But taken to extremes, you set up rhythmic interference instead of maintaining a groove. It’s not that you’re being too busy. It’s just […]
Category: coordination
Page o’ coordination: triplet pattern with cymbal variations – 01
A slight variation on our usual page o’ coordination thing; here we’re doing a set triplet pattern on the snare drum and bass drum, along with various cymbal parts— some are standard rhythms, and some […]
Inner Drumming
One of the more interesting drum books ever written is Inner Drumming, by George Marsh. Marsh is a big Tai Chi practitioner, and his linear drumming method, using a novel, artistic system of notation, is […]
Page o’ coordination: Afro 6 across the barline
We haven’t seen one of these in awhile— seriously, I have posted more stuff on this Afro 6 groove than anybody in the world, and if you have thoroughly practiced any three or four of […]
Dahlgren & Fine practice order
The “harmonic” coordination exercises from Dahlgren & Fine’s 4-Way Coordination is one of the more daunting collections of junk in the drumming literature. For many years I resisted using the book at all, but I finally got […]
Handedness is dubious
Granted, we may have gone overboard in the past… There’s a long blog post called Teaching Lefty Drummers, written by Illinois percussionist, drummer, and teacher Don Skoog, about the importance of handedness in drumming. I’ve […]
From the zone: Five in seven in six in four
A little Thanksgiving treat shared on Facebook by my friend Steve Pancerev: Let’s walk through this— it’s difficult, but not impossible. I see a jazz rhythm there, and a crazy independent part with a double-beamed […]
Page o’ coordination: Ahmad’s vamp
Something to go with yesterday’s practice loop, with some hihat splashes with the left foot. It’s nice and slow, but the track pushes and pulls a little bit, so the timing might be a little challenging […]
Good lord, that’s a deep pocket…
Here’s Levon Helm— if the question on your mind after seeing this is not “my God, how do I make my time sound like that?”, you may need to reexamine your priorities as a drummer… […]
Dahlgren & Fine workout in 3/4
Here’s a triplet workout in 3/4, using 4-Way Coordination by Marvin Dahlgren and Elliot Fine. The idea is fairly obvious, and has certainly occurred to a lot of people, but it might help for me […]