Sunday, December 22, 2019

Syncopation exercise in 3/4: quarter / dotted-quarter spacing

Another Ted Reed-style syncopation exercise, designed for a special purpose. This one is in 3/4, with all notes spaced two or three 8th notes apart— quarter notes or dotted quarter notes, or their equivalents with rests. We had another like this in 4/4 recently.





I wrote this for smoking a very basic interpretation: right hand (on cym) + bass drum play the melody part in unison, left hand (on snare) fills in the 8th notes in between. But it's also good for drilling the hard part of another standard triplet interpretation: right hand (on cym) + bass drum plays melody, left hand (on snare) fills in triplets— except when there are more than two filler notes in a row, the right hand moves to the snare drum to break it up.

Here's how you would play the first two measures of the exercise, with that interpretation:




You can see the right hand moves to the snare twice in the second measure— both common moves when you practice this method with the long exercises in Reed. Here you have the opportunity to do them a lot, and really work them out. 

Oh, you should buy my book Syncopation in 3/4. I don't know how I lived without it the first ~30 years of my career.

Get the pdf

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