Friday, April 09, 2021

Cliché control

A little writing experiment, like my old Funk Control pages, and my Philly Joe solo page. Here we have a lot of jazz soloing clichés, to practice in combination with each other. Similar to a page from John Riley's bebop drumming book— there are certainly some duplicate patterns, because I didn't make any effort for there not to be. You could easily use Riley's page together with this one. 

The idea is to play all of the patterns along with all of the other patterns, playing each measure once or twice, to make a two or four measure solo phrase. "Theoretically" you should play any two measure combination in both possible orders: A-B and B-A. That would be extremely time consuming, so it will be up to you to figure out a way to practice it that makes sense. Another possibility would be to play three measures of one thing, and one measure of the other. Use your judgement. 



Handle this loosely. It's not meant to be a technical workout, so feel free to simplify any part of it that's too difficult for you at whatever tempo you choose. To ease some transitions, you can put a quarter note on 4, or a quarter or 8th rest on 1. The patterns ending with a triplet or with 16th notes are going to want a release on 1, so you might add that the first time through transitioning to patterns starting with a rest. These are jazz patterns, but there's no need to religiously triplify all of the 8th notes. Think legato, not necessarily triplets. 

Move things around the drums, and vary the accents and stickings, however you see fit— Rs, Ls, both hands, flams, stick shots, whatever. Get fluent with the ideas, and connecting the ideas.

Get the pdf

No comments: