This goes out to my old friend Tim Willcox, who turned me on to this record- Jan Garbarek’s Dansere, with Jon Christensen on drums. Christensen is pretty important to the current thing going on in […]
Category: downloads
Basic solo vocabulary with Syncopation
Hey, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything downloadable of my own, and you don’t want to hear me prattle on about cymbals and crap, so here’s a basic solo vocabulary builder I’ve been working […]
MD column: Alternative open roll stickings
Here’s an interesting piece from that same old Modern Drummer from 1977. The writer, Mickey Earnshaw, proposes a set of alternate roll stickings, using the RLLR/LRRL paradiddle inverion or the RLLR/RLLR sticking in place of […]
Todd’s Methods: Stick Control in 5
So much for writing nothing. I’ve been doing a lot of practicing in 5/4 lately- I’ve always quite sucked at it, frankly- and finally getting it together for real has been a curious process. Very […]
All the grooves from Maggot Brain
Many of these are highly variable, so it may be presumptuous to declare that I’m giving you all the grooves from this record, but that’s the name of the series… I guess that’s what I […]
Todd’s paradiddle-diddle interpretation
This is the first practice method for the pages of syncopation exercises I posted the other day. Today I’ll give it to you just for the hands only, then later I’ll show you how I […]
Dave Tough’s Advanced Paradiddle Exercises
Here’s an out-of-print classic, scanned and made available for download thanks to Denver drummer Todd Reid. God knows if it will ever be made commercially available again, or if anyone even owns the copyright, so […]
Syncopation exercises with dotted quarter notes
This is one of many pages of original Syncopation variants I’ve written up, in this case restricted to combinations of dotted quarter notes, quarter notes, and single 8th notes. I’ve devised a few interpretive methods […]
Groove o’ the day: Billy Cobham in 17/16
I present this just as a curiosity, because I’ve never encountered this meter anywhere before (maybe in a percussion ensemble piece?). But you can see how we usually deal with the odd #/16 meters; often […]
Batucada on the drum set
We haven’t done anything new with samba in awhile, because I’m still digesting all of the stuff we’ve done previously. But here’s something new that came up yesterday, using open and muffled tones on the […]