“I’m trying to play less when keeping time behind a soloist,” Foster says, “not answering every phrase with the left hand and bass drum. You want to be on it, but not on everything. I’m […]
Category: performance practices
Slow tempos: the compound pulse
Following up on the subdiving post: you may have noticed that I suggested subdividing 8th notes at slow tempos— not triplets, as you might expect with music like jazz, that is often thought to be […]
The slow click
There should really be no such thing as slow to the person playing the drums. Whatever tempo the listener is hearing, the player is going to multiply it as necessary to make a comfortable, easily-maintainable […]
Perspectives on cymbals: part two
A recording engineer cries out: […] I’ve been giving some thought to the one thing that pisses me off the most when recording rock bands: drummers who incessantly bash the cymbals so they’re the loudest […]
Perspectives on cymbals, part the first
You may have noticed that I’ve lately been advocating for heavier cymbals than are currently in fashion, especially among jazz drummers. After pursuing ever lighter cymbals for most of the oughts, finally settling on some […]
VOQOTD: on swinging
To me, any drummer who hits the drums too hard doesn’t swing. — Peter Erskine Read the entire Drum! Magazine interview from 2000.
What is HIP?
George Colligan is trying to create a said thing. At his Jazz Truth blog there’s a post highly worth reading, about High Intensity Practicing, or HIP— his phrase— or “practicing REALLY HARD, at a sort […]
Mel Lewis on cymbals
More on cymbals from Mel Lewis’s 1985 Modern Drummer interview. This is pretty much the bible of the subject, as it relates to jazz: Number and type The average drummer usually uses two to four […]
Another Brian Blade performance
Since I’ve established a precedent of writing about it when I see Brian Blade play, I should write something feeble about last night’s show. Blade was playing with the guitarist/composer Joel Harrison, in a pretty […]
Writing drum charts
I just happened across a couple of nice posts on how to write a drum chart— that is, a handwritten page of notes sketching out whatever information you need to play through a song or […]