Going a little further with my earlier piece on making rock beats using— say it with me— Ted Reed’s Syncopation. In doing this, there will be many duplicate beats, but that’s not important— our purpose […]
Category: drums
Survival chops: right hand lead
This is the second in an extremely short series covering the bare essentials of what you need for “drumistic” fill, variation, and solo material across a variety of styles— you can read the intro to […]
8th notes around the drums — one hand
Here’s a conditioning page of 8ths notes played around the drums, with one hand. It’s easy enough that most drummers should be able to learn it well enough to play the page straight down in […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones — Summertime
Let’s start out the new year with a more substantial transcription than we’ve done in a while, in this case a very famous drum solo by Elvin Jones, on Summertime from John Coltrane’s My Favorite […]
Crossing accents
This very simple idea occurred to me while I was working on an Elvin Jones transcription today— either I had an insight into an underlying concept in his playing, or I was just daydreaming. What […]
RLB sticking applied
This is that previous right/left/bass sticking applied to Exercise 9 from Ted Reeds’s Syncopation (p. 45 in the old edition). The entire piece follows that sticking, except for a couple of spots. I’ve written in […]
Syncopation, Lesson 4, in 5/4
This is really a library piece— I use pp. 10-11 from Syncopation (that’s Lesson 4 in the new edition) so many different ways that I wanted to put it into 5/4. We’ll be referring to […]
Pad practice caveat
As someone who comes from the land of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, and the rest of that nightmare, it’s kind of quaintly Canadian that he calls this a “rant”, but Ted Warren says something […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes — Played Twice
I’m always listening to great drummers, but Roy Haynes just sweeps in and blows everyone away here. I love the way he plays this head. This is Thelonious Monk’s Played Twice, from The Straight Horn […]