Continuing a very easy system I’m using with a younger student— I feel kind of cheated that I wasn’t taught this myself, and that I haven’t been teaching it all these years. This is as […]
Category: EZ methods
EZ Reed method: Jack’s way
This is a very basic method improvised by a student of mine— for younger students, or as a remedial thing for others. It’s good for orienting students in the Reed thing, playing full drum set […]
EZ set ups and partial filler
I’m working through this with a student. It’s an easy reading item for the drum set, with a narrow set of parameters, using my tresillo inversions page (lines 1-8 only), my tresillo inversion combinations page, and […]
EZ ECM feel – 01 – unisons
This is the first part of a little method I used in a lesson recently, for introducing what has become known as an ECM-type feel— a modern, non-repetitive, quasi-linear, straight 8th jazz feel. See Jon […]
John and Nate’s jazz drumming page
I wrote this for a couple of my younger students— it’s a collection of simple jazz patterns that we went over verbally in a lesson. It’s meant to be very loose introduction to a type […]
Page o’ coordination: jazz / RLRR
Working on this Elvin project the last couple of days, I noticed that, similar to Max Roach on another recording, he plays the snare drum in the gap in the cymbal rhythm a lot, for […]
Stick Control patterns for a certain type of funk
A thing we do here is to rewrite/re-organize existing materials to make them better for practicing certain things. I hate hunting around the page while I practice, flipping pages, dodging things that are no good […]
World’s shortest Roy Haynes waltz lesson
UPDATE: See the page of practice suggestions for more on this! Someone on the internet asked me to explain what Roy Haynes is doing on the Chick Corea tune Windows, from the album Now He […]
Afro 6 warm up patterns
This is how I operate, after about ten years of writing the really hard stuff, I get around to giving people the easy way in. These are some preparatory exercises for playing an Afro 6 […]
EZiest swing in 5/4
Teachers’ item here. In working with various beginners, younger students, and hobbyists, you have to be flexible and creative in how you show them things. At those stages, differences in how people learn are really […]