Here are a few specific drills for use with the EZ rock method from the other day. Not every single thing you play using this method is going to sound great, but it’s a solid […]
Category: rock
Daily best music in the world: tax day
Listening to the Japanese band Boris while I finish my taxes. First rock band I’ve liked in a long time— mashing up all of the 90s (or the first half, anyway) and making it better.
EZ linear quarter note rock method
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 […]
Practice loop: Black Sabbath / Breakout
Practice loop sampled from Breakout, an instrumental jazz odyssey-type number from Black Sabbath’s 1978 album Never Say Die. Tempo is quarter note = 57 bpm. Nice and slow, good for getting into my very challenging […]
EZ rock beats in 5/4 – 02
More “EZ” rock beats in 5/4, this batch written to be easy to play at fast tempos, in 2+3 and 3+2 phrasing: Ways of practice— good for any page of grooves: • Repeat each pattern […]
EZ rock beats in 5/4 – 01
For one of my students, an easy page of rock beats in 5/4. We did one of these a few years ago, but this page illustrates the 2+3 / 3+2 phrasing of this time signature, […]
Funk drill tweak
This is a minor tweak to my standard funk drill using Ted Reed’s Syncopation. It was played by mistake by one of my students (6th grader), but it sounded good so I decided to keep […]
EZ RH/RF lick in 16th notes
More easy rock stuff, this time developing a basic RH/RF pattern in 16th notes, adding various left hand parts, and moves between drums and cymbals: Play all of the exercises many times, then improvise combinations. […]
Double time rock beats
Easy page of double time rock beats. We’re playing a little bit of a mind game here to get people to play these beats fast enough, since a lot of students get married to one […]
More practice phrases for EZ fills
Here are some more practice phrases to use with my page of EZ one-beat fills with tom moves, in a fast 4/4, and a slower tempo with the fill in 32nd notes. On the original page, the […]
