If you watched that video of Jabo Starks playing with John Scofield et al, you’ll notice that he does some hip stuff on the bell of the cymbal behind the trombone during the bridge between […]
Category: shuffle
5/8 accents in a triplet feel
I’ve worked on triplets and */8 feels a lot in my 35+ years playing the drums, and played a lot of music in the style, and still there’s a certain type of shuffle or 12/8 […]
Groove o’ the day: Jimmy Smith / Midnight Special
In about 1991 I lived in Eugene, Oregon, and every once in awhile KLCC 87.9 would play something that would send you immediately to Cat’s Meow (the jazz record store that survived for 30 years […]
Todd’s funk shuffle drill
This is a loose collection of stuff with which you can drill a rather busy, modern funk shuffle feel or triplet funk feel, a la Lopsy Lu or The Brecker Brothers’ Inside Out: OK, those […]
Page o’ coordination: triplet pattern with cymbal variations – 01
A slight variation on our usual page o’ coordination thing; here we’re doing a set triplet pattern on the snare drum and bass drum, along with various cymbal parts— some are standard rhythms, and some […]
Basic fluency in 12/8
Right, so it looks like we’ll be doing a lot with this triplet feel this week— mainly getting comfy improvising within this 12/8-style blues, soul or pop groove. Think Lopsy Lu, Higher Ground, Isn’t She […]
Page o’ coordination: “Afro Blues” bell – 02
Another page of coordination patterns for this Afro/shuffle cymbal pattern, which I’ll go ahead and call “Afro Blues” because I feel like it. It came up in my own playing, and I’m not aware of […]
Page o’ coordination: Afro shuffle bell pattern
This is something that came up in playing Back At The Chicken Shack, a shuffle by organist Jimmy Smith . We play a pretty open interpretation of the style on that tune, not a strict Blue Note […]
Page o’ coordination: shuffle bass drum variations
It’s a busy, busy, busy, busy time here— lots of gigs, lots of teaching, lots of work to be done on my house as we convert our little back house into an Air b’n’b. Nevertheless, […]
Studio triplet feel
Here’s a set of basic patterns for making a 70s-style triplet groove, or a moderate, triplety, shuffle,, as you hear on songs like Isn’t She Lovely, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You, […]