Pages

Monday, December 01, 2014

Page o' coordination: basic — 01

This whole Pages o' coordination series has been something of a nightmare of difficulty; they've been for advanced players, at least. I thought I'd see what I could do on the other end of the spectrum, so here's a fairly basic page of left hand independence within a rock or funk feel in 4/4.

Both measures of each exercise are the same, which may seem to be a pointless way of presenting the patterns; the reason for it is that I want you to able to read through the barline naturally, without jumping back to the beginning every measure— I've had some students put a mental break between beat 4 and the following beat 1 for that reason. And I just don't like to be exclusively thinking of music in single measures. As you practice, then, move your eye through both measures of the exercise during the first few repetitions, then memorize the pattern.




If you play your right hand on the cymbal, you can try doing the left hand moves, moving to a different drum on every note or every double (on the ones where there are notes a 16th note apart), or moving strictly on every single note, splitting the doubles between drums. If you want to do something with your left foot, in that case, go ahead— play it on beats 2 and 4, or on all four beats, or on the 8th notes, or on all the &s. Don't feel obligated to cover them all— we want to make a reasonable-length workout out of this, not grind you into the dirt covering every last possible thing in the world.

Get the pdf

No comments:

Post a Comment