Bringing these recent right hand lead Reed tweaks into some basic day to day rock vocabulary. I'll illustrate these using the tom ruffs we looked at recently— try them with any of the other things we've done recently with filling in the larger spaces, or whatever else you can fit in there. My student Jack (age 12) is tearing these up right now.
Here we'll play a two measure phrase, selected from the full page exercises in Syncopation, playing the rhythm as a rock beat in the first measure, then filling in any large spaces— of two or three 8th notes—in the rhythm in the second measure. We can treat some of the surrounding written notes as ensemble accents, and catch them on a crash cymbal, with the bass drum in unison.
Many of the phrases are straightforward. Here's the book rhythm, and that rhythm interpreted as a rock beat, and then with the fill in the second measure, and then with some cymbal accents:
Others may require some creativity to make them work out naturally— especially when the phrase starts with a rest in the book rhythm.
Here are some two measure phrases from p. 38 of Syncopation that are good for this:
You could play through the full page exercise this way, I find that the two measure phrase is better, more similar to actual rock playing, and gives us some space to think about how to orchestrate the fill and cymbal accents. There are several more examples in the pdf. We'll look at some more complex examples, and other possibilities, in part two.
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