This Max Roach Freedom Suite transcription is like a text book on jazz comping— one method of it, anyway. I’m having my students extract some two and three beat cells from the transcribed excerpts; here […]
Category: exercises
Basic drum set coordination – 01 – alternating
A page for teachers, for beginning through intermediate level students. I want them to have total clarity on what it feels like to play all the major limbs, and unisons between limbs, and the basic […]
Hemiola funk series: 2/4 inversions
I wrote this out for some of my younger students, and also as a continued exploration of this hemiola rhythm in funk. It’s very similar to some other things I’ve posted— most of these left […]
Page o’ coordination: another basic 3:2
UPDATE: pdf download now works Back in Portland after a road trip to northern California… recording drums for a quasi-punk record by my wife and one of her 90s East Village cronies, in a Lions […]
Page o’ coordination: Max’s rubadub?
This is a page of jazz comping exercises based on Max Roach’s playing on Sonny Rollins’s Freedom Suite, which I’m transcribing right now. There’s a lot of interplay between the snare drum and bass drum, […]
Page o’ coordination: Simple 3:2
Coming at that 3:2 hemiola polyrhythm from the triplet side— all of our recent hemiola funk stuff has been using it in a duple subdivision. Here we’ll use the 2 side as the primary pulse, […]
Page o’ coordination: 3/2 over 12
Adding to our already-voluminous background for playing an Afro feel, or any 6/8 or 12/8 feel. Here we’re phrasing in 3/2 and 12/8 at the same time, using a common cymbal pattern. It’s easier to […]
Hemiola funk – repeated beats
More of this hemiola funk idea, putting the two basic 3/4 patterns into 4/4 by repeating each beat of the pattern… starting on each beat of the pattern. I don’t know if there’s a special […]
Guaguanco – two ways
A little more on general fluency with a Guaguanco-type groove on drumset. It’s not a style that authentically uses a drumset, but the groove is a hip alternative for non-traditional situations. It has a nice […]
EZ fill developer
This might be more of an item for teachers. This is a sketch of a method I’ve found to be effective for teaching younger students to play fills, and play them in time, with both […]