This is something I wasn’t going to post until I had made decent headway with it; which I have, at the cost of some misery. If you’ve been keeping up with current events, the Afro […]
Category: downloads
Page o’ coordination: Afro 9/8
The “Afro” feel in 9/8, or 3/4, is not exactly a standard feel, but it does come up. Like, in Portland, a tune by the drummer/composer Lawrence Williams gets called quite often, among several different […]
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. […]
Partido Alto variations
The partido alto rhythm, in this case; it’s also a Brazilian song style, a type of funk groove, and a tune (see below). It’s one of the major rhythms in Brazilian music— several of the batucada […]
Page o’ coordination: hihat splash in 5/4
Here’s the disconcerting third dropped shoe in this recent spate of hihat splash pages o’…, now in 5/4, and I… Wow, I think that may be the ugliest, most incomprehensible sentence I’ve ever written. I’m […]
Syncopation exercises in 3/4 — 01
This is a straight library piece: some syncopation exercises in 3/4, similar to the one-measure exercises in the middle section of Ted Reed’s Syncopation, for doing all of the usual things you do with that […]
Groove o’ the day, plus fills: Mandrill — Tee Vee
There was a period in the 70s when funky music had a kind of unbridled quality you don’t much hear any more— there was a lot of screaming, and everyone seemed to be fully embracing […]
Locking with clave — 01
This is derived from an idea discussed by David Peñalosa in his book Rumba Quinto. In rumba, an Afro-Cuban genre, the quinto is the highest-pitched conga drum; the quinto player is the lead player, improvising […]
Page o’ coordination: hihat splash in 3/4 — 02
Hey, I kind of like these things— we’ll see several more pages o’… with hihat splashes, in the near future. This format has become one of the major things we do here, as I’ve had […]
Three Camps in first inversion paradiddles
2024 UPDATE: This page looks really awful. I’ve just posted a much nicer looking version of it. Here’s an adaptation of the traditional snare drum piece Three Camps, played with first inversion paradiddles— the very useful […]