Reed tweak: RH lead - backbeats with double stops

Transcription: Billy Cobham - For Someone I Love

Here's that Billy Cobham transcription— just of a busy portion of Freddie Hubbard's solo on For Someone I Love, on Milt Jackson's record Sunflower. I'm learning a lot about Musescore doing something this damn complicated. 

Ignoring form altogether here, the transcription begins at 4:25, a few measures into Hubbard's solo— the first few bars are very light, you can hear where he plays the ruffs/triplets at the beginning of the page— and cutting out after the last big insane lick, out of sheer exhaustion. Tempo is about 74 bpm. 

If it looks like a fragmented nightmare, take it up with Mr. Cobham. He packs a lot of stuff into some small spaces. I have some questions about bar 10— the end of yesterday's sixtuplet lick— but I can only let this guy beat me up for so long. It is what it is.  

UPDATE: There's a slight fault in the notation in measure 21— each of those drags should be played as a nested triplet. There are supposed to be three dots (...) printed about each of them. Correction coming when I can get to it...

Get the pdf

Billy, switch to decaf babe

Getting cocky about my Musescore skills now, working on a Billy Cobham transcription, from Milt Jackson's album Sunflower. On the tune For Someone I Love, he does sort of an insane thing that almost crashes the album. The whole thing is really loose anyway. 

It happens after 4:45, during the trumpet solo: 

The actual transcription isn't complete, but here's a chunk of what he plays there: 

It's kind of cursed, I can count through the surrounding four measure phrase, but I can't get the last measure of the lick (not pictured) to resolve to 4/4. I blame Satan. 

Anyway, it's essentially an eight note pattern— two paradiddles (or paradiddle inversions, I don't know how he was thinking it) played on the hihat and snare drum, with feet added. Here are some possible inversions of it, in 16ths and triplets: 

Probably wise to learn the triplet form with hands only at first. I would want to know where the beginning of the eight note pattern falls, and each paradiddle, and the quarter note pulse— most importantly. Print it out and mark it up. Have fun, make some enemies, transcription coming soon. 

Transcription: Flight For Freedom - 01

OK, first complete transcription using Musescore, doing basically everything I need it to do for this site. Same recording I've been working with, Flight For Freedom by Oliver Nelson, from his record Skull Session, with Shelly Manne on drums. There was some dispute over whether it might have been Jim Gordon instead— we'll listen to one of his tracks from this record and check out the difference. 

This is the first minute of the track: 

I think he's using a four piece set plus a couple of concert toms. Mostly rides on the hihat, and he hits that ugly sounding swish cymbal quite often. And a crash cymbal, and he gets onto the ride cymbal at the end. Towards the end there's an unusual percussion sound I can't identify— I think he's playing it, but it could be someone else. He did quirky stuff like that at times. 

I really want my thing of notating half-open hihats with a tenuto mark to catch on. 

Get the pdf

Check out this track with Jim Gordon for comparison: 

Gordon hits harder, and is more aggressive, has a little sharper edge as a pure groove player— he seems more polished for this kind of music. Manne perhaps makes some more unusual choices, and is looser. They're both playing with a lot of forward momentum, I can't define the difference in quality of groove between them— Manne feels more “behind the beat”, but I'm not sure that's accurate at all. These are pretty nuanced impressions— they're both right on it, and have done a thousand sessions at this point, and are great. I enjoy Manne's playing more, he's warmer; Gordon is like a machine for this kind of playing. Not to say he sounds machine-like— do you dig the distinction? 

Feelings and impressions are hilarious— the words that come into your head may not be the actual thing happening on the recording. 

Listen to the rest of the record. Gordon plays on Skull Session, Dumpy Mama, and Japanese Garden.
 

Musescore notes: 

I've actually got it pretty close to where I want it, with the appearance of my template, and with using it. Two or three days of fussing around is actually not bad. 

Stem length
A lingering visual annoyance was the general stubby appearance of the notes. Under format > style > notes I saw that the shorten stems box was checked by default. I set the shortened stem length to 2.95sp— a little shorter than the default non-shortened stem length.  

Work modes

Navigating the various work modes are still a little obscure. I'll be hitting the Esc key often to switch from note entry mode— which doesn't always act the way I expect it to— to doing general stuff mode, where I can select measures and individual notes/articulations/text to do something with them.  

Note entry
Entering notes I use the keys a lot— hotkeys for the major drum sounds, arrows for navigating, number pad for rhythm value, + shift key to enter two notes in unison. For drum sounds that don't have a hotkey, I highlight the note/rest then mouse click on the thing I want in the key at the bottom of the window. For anything else I use the mouse to select it. 

Using the arrow keys, sometimes moving L-R selects the next note or articulation in a stack, sometimes not. 

Exporting
Really easy. For some reason my version of Finale sucked for exporting pdfs and jpegs— I had to use a pdf printer app (cutepdf, it's quite useful) to export to pdf, and then actually upload it to a web site (online2pdf.com, also quite useful) to convert it to a jpeg. Really dumb, and time consuming. 

Musescore has a nice friendly PUBLISH tab at the top of the screen that lets you output it any number of ways quickly and easily. 

Note entry is the main thing I need to get sorted out. I'll do a dedicated post for that in the next few days. Or not— I'm not sure how helpful my personal notes will be for people. Just read this page on entering notes and this page on navigating the document. 

Working with Musescore - 02

Getting further into Musescore with an easy Shelly Manne transcription, a rock arrangement called Flight For Freedom, from Oliver Nelson's record Skull Session. I like Manne's rock playing— it's a little different, with a great deep sound and pocket.  

These are things I had to figure out while making it, in the order they came up.  

I first had to make some adjustments to my template:  

Cleaning up palettes
Under the palettes tab, there are a number of things I don't need: clef, pitch, key signature, etc.

Click on the unwanted thing, hit the [...] options button, and select hide. 

Then click add palettes and select some things to add: grace notes, lines, whatever else you want.

Editing the drumset
I want to set up my template with every drum I'm likely to need, with a proper note head and hot key.

In note entry mode, at the bottom of the screen you should see a key to the drum set, with an edit drum set.  

Under edit drum set, you can just click an empty slot on the left side of the window, and give it a name, notehead, and line/space on the right side of the window. I don't care about playback, so I haven't figured out how to assign sounds. 

And of course you can modify existing entries by clicking on them, and changing them the same ways. 

Problem: it looks like I only get hotkeys for the letters A-G. I want more than that, we'll see if it's possible.

Here is the current state of the transcription: 

I really need to figure out how entering text works.
UPDATE: In fact, you just drag it where ever you want after typing it.

Pickup measure
The drums play a little three note lead in. Select the first measure > right click > select measure properties.

There are settings for nominal and actual measure duration. Reset the actual duration to the length of the pick up measure— three 8th notes in this case.
   

Muting drum sounds while entering music
I'm listening to the piece as I'm transcribing, I don't want to hear their crappy midi drum sounds while I'm doing that.

At the top of the screen hit edit > preferences > note input > uncheck play notes while editing. 

Flams
Select the note you want to embellish, go to the palettes tab > grace notes, click on the symbol for the type of grace note you want to add. For ruffs, click repeatedly for the number of grace notes you want. 

To move the grace notes to a different drum, select the note and use the up/down arrows.

Problem: on the palette they're pictured with a little slur attaching it to the note it embellishes, but they don't render that way in the score. You can add a slur by selecting a note and hitting the S key, but the slur is not scaled for a grace note, and was not attached to the note I wanted. You can move it, but it's a little weird.   

Articulations
Select the note you want, click appropriate articulation in the articulations palette. 

To remove, right click on the articulation and hit delete. There's got to be a better way of doing that. 

To remove all articulations in a measure or region, right click the articulation then select > similar in this range > then delete.  

Annoyance: I want some articulations to be positioned further above the beams than the default. You can change that in the articulations palette— right click on the symbol > select properties, change y axis: -.5 sp (for example) But: the position change shows in the palette, but not in the score. 

I also don't like the appearance of all of them— will need to get into the settings to correct that, if possible. 

Noteheads
The first cymbal hit is a swish cymbal (man, those A. Zildjian swishes sound bad). You can permanently add something to the drum set instrument following the directions above, or change the note head for a single note by selecting the note, then the properties tab > note > notehead > select the notehead you want. 

Line breaks
In Finale we set the number of measures for each line via a setting. Ctrl-M, I think. In Musescore, reminiscent of a word processor, you just hit enter where you want the line break to be. 

Double bars
Click on the measure you want, go to the barlines palette, click the appropriate thing. Easy. 

Ghost notes
Indicated by a parenthesis around the notehead. They're easy; select the note, then the properties tab > note > notehead parentheses.

Problem: since we often deal with groups of ghost notes, having open and close parentheses on every note will quickly clutter up the page. I need options for note + open parenthesis and note + close parenthesis. 

UPDATE: There are open and close parenthesis symbols hiding in the MASTER PALETTE (shift + f9 to view), under noteheads. Click on the thing you want in the master palette, and drag it to your working palette for your template. 

It's going pretty good. I need to get a handle on entering and positioning text, and get better just navigating the program and entering/working with notes. The modes are still a little obscure— “note entry” mode, and some other kind of mode. 

The way the music is scaled on the page bothers me. Copying the dimensions accurately from Finale to Musescore will be problematic, because they are entered in inches in Finale, and in staff spaces (mostly) in Musescore. Onward. 

Very occasional quote of the day: relationships for leaders

“The only thing that is really important in your relationship with actors is that they must know that you admire them, that you admire their work, and there’s no way to fake that. You must really admire them or you shouldn’t use them. If they know that you admire their work, which they can sense in a thousand different ways, it doesn’t really matter what you think of each other or what you say to them, or whether you are terribly friendly or not. The thing they care about is their work. 

Some actors are very amusing and pleasant and always cheerful. They are, of course, more pleasant to have around than those who are morose, vacant, or enigmatic. But how they behave when you're not shooting has very little to do with what happens when the camera turns over.” 

- Stanley Kubrick, Sight And Sound interview, 1972

Alec Guinness and I were making a film called Tunes of Glory several years ago. At the end of about the first week he was very sulky. He was very low and miserable and grumpy and irritable. I said, “Alec, what’s the matter? We’re all trying very hard and you seem so miserable and depressed and it’s getting us all down. We feel as though we’re not getting a good picture and that you don’t like any of us. Is there anything I can do?” 

He said, “You know, Ronnie, I have been working on this picture for nearly two weeks and not once has anybody ever said to me, ‘'Alec, you are really very, very good. We think you are marvelous.’ 

I said, “Well, good gracious, Alec, we think that you are marvelous. What we are trying to do is live up to you. We have taken it for granted that you know we think you are marvelous.” 

He said, “Ronnie, I have to tell you something about actors.”

- Director Ronald Neame, in Directing The Film, by Eric Sherman

Snare drum vs. drum set training

The following are some comments I made in a contentious online conversation about snare drum training and drum set training— or playing— and the differences between the two, that I think stand on their own— edited slightly for clarity:

The snare drum and the drum set are different instruments, played differently.

Snare drum training is two handed playing on one drum, dealing with all areas of performance on the snare drum— reading, accents, flams and ruffs, rolls, rudiments. See any method book, technique book, and rudimental book: Podemski, Goldenberg, Stone, Wilcoxon. Intermediate Snare Drum Studies and Rudimental Primer by Mitchell Peters give a reasonable minimum standard for baseline proficiency.

Drum set training means playing the drum set, a four limbed instrument using a snare drum, a bass drum, some cymbals, and some tom toms, as a coordinated thing. Training involves things related to coordination, styles, the functions of the components of the instrument, playing and setting up figures, reading interpretively, improvising, filling, soloing. 

Much of that we develop through the book Syncopation— the most common things done with it are in John Ramsay's Alan Dawson book. I've also written a hundred or so systems for it on my site. Other books broadly outlining that are Steve Houghton's Studio and Big Band Drumming book, Ed Uribe's Brazilian and Afro-Cuban books, and Kim Plainfield's Advanced Concepts book. Those all outline the primary techniques of the instrument, and practice systems for developing them. 

You can't get where those books take you just by getting good with your ratamacues.

Much of ordinary drum set playing doesn't require a lot of technical ability as a snare drummer. Though it can be very helpful, and necessary for some ways of playing. And necessary if someone's going to be a competent professional.

The drum set has its own language now. Approaching the drum set as “snare drumming plus some other stuff” is antiquated.

Reading real old drumming materials it's kind of shocking how contemporary some of it is. And how not. Much of it is oriented around how to play a 2/4 march and how to play a 6/8 march, and that's about it. 2 feel with the bass drum / 4 feel with the bass drum.

On the snare drum alone, I don't see a great logic to playing patterns 1-72 in Stick Control, except it's a different sequence of Rs and Ls. The sequences themselves are an important part of the language of drumming, but I don't know how helpful it truly is to just learn a lot of ways of making static 8th notes on one drum. Except to work on evenness between hands— which is something, but not everything.

It's kind of like making a piano student run their scales with all the notes on the keyboard sounding middle C. The differences in pitches aid understanding the thing, they're the whole reason for the thing.

I don't know of another instrument that requires people to learn complex fingerings while sounding a single pitch.

I learned most of Stone on an actual snare drum, standing up in a little hallway at school— an hour of Stone like that. Flam pages 21-23. It was a miserable way to practice, and ultimately poor practice economy for the effort.

If you play 1-72 from Stone on a drum set with the hands hitting two different sounds, there's an obvious musical difference between the patterns— there is a reason to play one over another, an auditory difference. So you learn the pattern as a piece of musical content, not just as a mathematical sequence. 

Part of why so many drummers are such lousy musicians is they think in terms of Rs and Ls and not in terms of melodic ideas— which we get from that latter thing.

The bigger reason to do a lot of snare drum is not just for how you'll use it directly. Your hands are still where most of your facility is going to be. There are some bodies of SD materials that are pretty essential to more-than-basic drum set playing— accented singles, flam rudiments, paradiddle rudiments, open rolls and drags. And the more advanced snare drum materials cover some things that no drum set materials cover— finer aspects of rhythm, various forms of time changes, finer dynamic control, and timing control.

Different students have different goals. We start on snare drum, and continue with it as necessary, as their goals evolve. The two instruments develop concurrently. 

I teach all levels of people, with all sorts of playing goals that are not mine. Not everyone knows how serious they're going to be about it when they start. Many of them are not irrationally motivated to do it, as I was, and need to be given a chance to get hooked, and get more ambitious about what they want to accomplish with it.

The idea is not to teach limitation, the idea is to find a path forward for everyone, and teach things in a timely manner with the growth of their interest, goals, and commitment.

I get a lot of students who were poorly taught— by themselves, or others. There are a lot of very bad drum teachers (and bad drummers) out there, often teaching ideas they inherited from their teacher, that they never really understood, and never questioned. Or they try to reinvent the instrument based on some popular trends, without understanding what they're reinventing. I'm not thrilled with the way a lot of people do things on this instrument. There are a lot of lingering primitive ideas about how it works.

Nothing half assed about any of this— I put a tremendous amount of energy into helping my students become excellent and creative players to whatever extent they want to pursue it.

How much snare drum would you require before touching a drum set for a nine year old beginner? Or a 70 year old beginner? Or someone with a high pressure job who does music as a distraction from that? 

Also see this post on snare drummers vs. drum set players.