Just an easy page of hemiola funk-type beats including the RLB pattern as a fill, that I wrote for my students, who have been having a lot of fun with this series. Write in the […]
Category: exercises
Three notes, one on cymbals – 01
This little assignment is related to several things we’ve done lately: my harmonic coordination improved method, and my rock drill; playing it in */4 meters with a swing feel gives you something similar to rubadub. […]
Flam combinations in 6/8
Way too many wordy posts recently, with more coming, so let’s do a simple page of flam exercises in 6/8— in a triplet feel. Like p. 34 in Stick Control, but more robust. Whenever I […]
Building rubadub – 01
For intermediate jazz students, here is a page for learning the basic pattern for Mel Lewis’s rubadub concept (as helpfully explained by Chris Smith), about as thoroughly as possible, while also developing solid execution with […]
RLB intro page
This is based on a page I wrote in 2012— I was using that with a younger student, and marked it up so heavily that it was unreadable. So here’s a clean version of what we […]
Hemiola funk series: SS-BB / BB-SS
Another permutation on this basic hemiola funk format I’ve devised, doubling up on the BS, forwards and backwards… wait. I’m deliberately not really giving you a finished concept here— I just wrote this up to […]
Syncopation exercise in 3/4: quarter / dotted-quarter spacing
Another Ted Reed-style syncopation exercise, designed for a special purpose. This one is in 3/4, with all notes spaced two or three 8th notes apart— quarter notes or dotted quarter notes, or their equivalents with […]
Three Camps – 16th notes, combination stickings
The traditional rudimental piece Three Camps is a good framework for drilling speed and endurance, and to that end I’ve written several paradiddle combination stickings to use with it. I’ve been playing it as 16th […]
Syncopation rhythms: two notes
UPDATE: Download link is working now! I’ve been posting a series of syncopation pages written/organized around a single idea for ease of practicing certain things. It’s partly for my students, so I can give assignments […]
Jazz waltz with Chaffee
Let’s detail something I mentioned in the Chaffee jazz post: using the patterns in that system as 8th notes in a jazz waltz. They’re three-note (or rest) patterns, so playing them two times = a […]