I may have written this up before, but I can’t find it in the archives, and I probably didn’t include the embellishments I’m going to tell you today, so what the hell, let’s do it […]
Category: exercises
Three Camps in 6-stroke rolls
For awhile I was campaigning to get this RLLRRL sticking called “Swiss sixtuplets”, based on an overheard conversation from drum corps days, when George Tuthill and Alan Kristensen, two corps legends, were talking about rudiments. […]
Page o’ coordination: That with interruptions – 03
I like this little series. Nothing radically innovative, but a slightly different way of thinking about normal jazz comping vocabulary, courtesy of John Riley. These pages aren’t ordered for total beginners— if I were teaching […]
Three Camps in paradiddle-diddles
For such a simple piece, Three Camps sure is a notation headache. There’s next to nothing happening in it, but it takes a whole lot of ink to write it out, and it never looks […]
Page o’ coordination: that with interruptions – 02
Another page of basic jazz comping/independence patterns, coming from a slightly different angle. At a recent John Riley clinic, he talked about one pattern he had been practicing, with variations, for about 50 years: SSBB. […]
Page o’ coordination: Cinquillo
Here’s an easy page o’ coordination based on a basic bell rhythm, known in Latin music circles as “cinquillo”— which basically means quintuplet. It’s not a quintuplet, it’s the indicated 5-note rhythm, but that’s what […]
Rudiments in 5/8
A page of snare drum rudiment practice phrases, written in 5/8, in a 3+2 phrasing. Keep this with your copy of Haskell Harr (book 2) or Rudimental Swing Solos. These can all be played at […]
Hemiola funk series – SB-BS
I like this series. It’s a little half-baked, and I’ll probably have to rewrite it eventually, but I feel we’re closing in on something. A theory of rhythm and playing the drumset not based on […]
Syncopation p. 37 in 16th notes
Continuation of this item, in which I transcribe exercises by Ted Reed into 16th notes. Here I’ve done the famous page 37 exercise. I won’t be doing any other pages because that would be obsessive […]
Hemiola funk series – BS-SB
Further exploring hemiola rhythms in various meters and drum set orchestrations… there will be several more posts like this coming soon. It’s a simple idea that nevertheless needs to be written out, and it takes […]