Here’s the triplet-based companion for the harmonic coordination improved warm-up. It’s a less miserable and soul-destroying, more musically relatable way of playing exercises of the type found in the harmonic coordination section of Dahlgren & […]
Category: triplets
Preparation for Reed triplet studies
A page of short triplet exercises that are preparation for some of the major practice methods I do with the book Syncopation: the right handed solo method, and the so-called “Ruff Bossa” method, found in […]
Open ratamacues for drumset
More jazz solo vocabulary: my previous page of open ratamacues, adapted for the drumset. It’s pretty simple: we’ve just moved the doubles to the bass drum. I eliminated the triple ratamacues because I don’t like […]
6/8 rhythmic literacy – 01
This has been a lurking annoyance for me for a long time: students don’t know how to read basic rhythms in 6/8… any of the */8 meters. It looks weird and is often explained poorly, […]
Stick control patterns in 9/8
Oh, fine: here are some stick control patterns in 9/8, for practicing with the Bill Frisell loop from the other day: You can scour these posts for ways of applying these patterns to the drum […]
EZ triplet bass drum / cymbal drill
Do you think most of what you play in real life is hip, complicated, multi-layered, polyrhythmic, hybrid-rudimental madness? Sir, it is not. Most of what you play is normal, obvious, easy stuff. You want to […]
Page o’ coordination: SB / BS
For some reason* this particular pattern is always difficult for me: snare-bass/bass-snare on the second two triplet partials. So let’s work on it, adding the left foot, and varying the cymbal rhythm. If you find […]
Page o’ coordination: triplet pattern with cymbal variations – 02
Part 2 of something we did way back in January (where the hell did the year go, actually?), changing cymbal rhythms against a steady left hand and bass drum pattern. Here we’re just inverting the […]
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 […]
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 […]