Reed tweak: linear fill in another setting

A similar item to another recent thing, with a Reed system I use pretty often, but don't talk about much— with the hands plaing the book rhythm, and the bass drum filling in the spaces. Hands lead / bass drum fills. I play this system with a (mostly) alternating sticking, you can also play the melody part with both hands in unison, or as flams, if both are on the same drum.   

The tweak is to do a linear 16th note fill on the longer spaces in the melody rhythm— on the runs of two or more 8ths on the bass drum. Where there would normally be two 8ths on the bass drum, play BRLB (B = bass drum); where there would be three 8ths on the bass, play BRLRLB. 

For each lettered example below, I give the basic way of playing it in this system, and how to play it with the linear fill: 

Move your hands around the drums, of course. I never worked out a perfectly satisfactory sticking system for this method. I do it mostly alternating, with a bias for leading the multiples with the right hand. Always stick the 16th note fill the same way. 

Work it up with the one line exercises in Syncopation pp. 30-31 and 34-37, then try the full page exercises starting on p. 38. Go for speed with this, you can do it fast. 

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Subtractive method: key to BSSB-SBBS

If you're not doing anything with this system, you should give it a try. It's a way of orchestrating rhythms from Syncopation (or rhythms from wherever) between the snare drum and bass drum, based on an underlying 8th note pattern. 

This particular pattern— BSSB-SBBS— supports several areas of playing really well: clave based music, Baiao, New Orleans kind of funk/street beat, funk in general. I've posted about it a bunch of times. 

So this here is a key for it— all the basic parts of it, which you can use as warm ups for applying the system while reading from Syncopation. Or you can use this page as a complete set of practice patterns by itself. 

See also: 
Key with Mozambique rhythm
Key for Guaguanco
Tresillo unit - part 2
Practice rhythms: tresillo/cinquillo inversions
Practice rhythms: tresillo combinations - two measures 
Practice rhythms: Partido Alto variations
Practice rhythms: Partido Alto logic
More practice rhythms

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Best books: Working Space

Here's an old favorite, by the painter Frank Stella, who died this week: Working Space— you can read it online at that link. It's pretty dense, but there's a lot to learn about art in it. You may have to blow past some of the more intense verbiage, as I did. He worries the concept of “pictoriality”, which I never fully grasped. 

Here's Stella in the documentary film Painters Painting— he's verbose, but what he's talking about is mostly simple— what he's doing, and what's in his pictures, which is not a whole lot. He was considered to be a minimalist early in his career, less so later on. 

It turns out that it's not that easy to make a simple picture, if you have some ideas about how it's supposed to go— like if you want people to get the picture instantly, and without alluding to any kind of three dimensional space. Hence everything he has to say about it there.

Where people get into trouble with work like his— and with that level of conversation about it— is they think the artist is demanding that they take it as some kind of profoundly meaningful thing. Which they do not feel, so they become hostile. But the pictures really just are what they are, they're pretty quick experiences, you see the thing, maybe notice the logic of its design, and that's it. If that's hard to accept, maybe you think about art a little bit, about why that's not enough for you, and about what you want from it. 

Stella seems to be coming from the same kind of place as the critic Clement Greenberg, who was real worried about pictures being abstract enough, and flat-looking enough— he wanted no illusion of space. History demanded it, in his mind. You can get a little bit of what he's about in the essay “American-type Painting” here. He also liked to assign things status as “major” and “minor” art, which is BS, purely him asserting own status as a New York art world “power broker” or whatever. He was kind of full of it. 

It would be easy to dismiss Stella as part of the same category, but as someone who builds things, he's more grounded in reality. It's worth spending some time with him, even if you don't have a lot of affinity for his work. Which I don't. It's a little too cool for me, and I want something I can look at for awhile. But he gives you a lot to think about. 

Something strange

This person is making a lot of videos composing accompaniment for drum solo videos by some well known players, “adding music”, as he says. The first few minutes explain this was done, then there's an extended drum solo by Simon Phillips, with his added accompaniment:

That's highly strange and ethically suspect on a number of levels: 

1. The solo was music in the first place, calling it a drum solo “with music” puts me in a bad mood about it from the get go. 

2. Did he get permission to do it? From the people who own the videos, or the drummers involved? Did they consent to having their playing used this way? There's no indication of that. Why not call them up and ask permission, and then put a big thank you in the video description? 

3. Are they getting paid for it? Well... very likely they are. At least the entity that was getting paid for the original video probably is. YouTube is good about detecting copyright violations and paying the infringed party. So if you make a cat video with Coltrane's Interstellar Space on the soundtrack, or if I sample somebody's recording to make a practice loop, the rights holder there will probably get paid, you and I would not get paid.   

4. Copyright is weirdly inverted. He's mimicking something uncopyrighted (the musical content of the drum solo) to make something copyrighted. Basically the melodic content was created by the drummer, and he seized ownership of it by assigning pitches to it.

5. He's involuntarily reassigning these players' performances to be accompaniment for his music, but those drummers would not necessarily make the same choices interpreting that piece if it had been written first— as in normal playing situations. Making choices in how we play an arrangement is a major aspect of a drummer's voice, and of how you judge someone's performance. While it is clear that the drum solo came first, by creating this context around it he's putting words in the drummer's mouth: here is how you will handle this situation. 

7. Usually you don't steal somebody's performance in its entirety. Even making a fair use legal argument, that's not fair use. 

8. Mickey Mousing is a term from film scoring, where the music exactly mimics the action on screen, and it is considered to be very bad writing. Here the added orchestration is flashy but primitive, Mickey Mousing the drum solo exactly in unison with it— drummer hits a high note / orchestra plays a high note with him, drummer plays a low note, orchestra plays a low note. There's no interaction. It does open up a bit on the groove portions of the solo, but it's 95% simple mimicry. 

Here, here's a quick lesson in doing things other than that in creating an accompaniment, and in altering a melodic line generally. 

9. If he wants to create a derivative work that is largely a note-for-note copy of someone else's improvised performance, he can do that, but his piece should be able to stand on its own. There's nothing here anyone would want to listen to without the original drumming performance. 

My complaints in rapid fire. Maybe none of it really matters. For people trying to make it in social media, whatever gets me attention = good. I expect that's the position of the person who made the videos, and maybe even for some of the drummers involved, if they were informed of it. Music has been so devalued in the last 25 years that, for many people, its major (or only) purpose may be as a device for grabbing social media attention. 

There are artistic/critical theories supporting this kind of thing— e.g. “appropriation”, sampling in hip hop— but which do not make it legal or ethical, when done non-consensually. Other artists' performances are not your found objects. You have to clear it, there has to be consent.  

Whether or not you personally agree with any part of this, there are legal issues you have to be aware of, and answer for when engaging in this kind of work, if you're doing music professionally, or want to be doing it professionally. It's going to matter to some people, possibly to the point of making your work unpresentable publicly. 

Groove o' the day: two by Elvin Jones

I have a couple of larger transcriptions going right now, from a couple of Elvin Jones live albums, but don't have time to complete them, so here are the major grooves from them. 

The first one is an Afro 6/8, on Tin Tin Deo on the album Very R.A.R.E.: 

He is using three tom toms there, but it barely matters. 

Note on the word feel, here: you see it's written in 4/4 as 8th note triplets— because the tune is in 4/4, if you were looking at a lead sheet. The 6/8 or 12/8 groove is being played as a feel within the 4/4 time, with the beat in the same place, which makes the 6/8 rhythm into triplets. Calling it 6/8 or whatever refers to the normal meter of the groove, not the meter of this setting. 

The other is on A Love Supreme, from Elvin Jones Jazz Machine Live in Japan— a Latin groove with a Mozambique rhythm on the cymbal bell— very timely as we've been working on an “Elvinized” Mozambique lately. Here's the groove as he plays it with one note on the tom tom, and with two: 

Again, he's playing this in 16th notes as a double time feel— the feet are stating the underlying 4/4, and they're in half time compared to what we would normally expect with this groove. 

Here's the groove written out as a two measure, 8th note based rhythm, which is how I would normally write it. Obviously the feet are in half time there, with the bass drum on 1 and the hihat on 3: 

He plays the repeating rhythm without a lot of major variations or fills, but he does a lot with it dynamically. At times he'll lean into these accents in the bell part: 

The groove comes in after the opening rubato section— it takes a few bars before it develops into the grooves we see here: 

Reed tweak: filling in 16ths - 02

Boy, if you're not doing all my Reed stuff, you're really missing out. These things square away a ton of stuff that people generally have to put together piecemeal— I had to do that. Figure it out, contact me for a lesson if you need to. 

This is a preliminary item to part 1, but I didn't feel like posting this first. A very simple tweak to the basic RH lead system, filling in the bass drum after each snare drum note. Basically every snare drum note becomes two 16ths, split between the snare and bass. There's an option of filling in a 16th before each snare note as well. 

Take it as a bass drum endurance drill. It should be easy to get it up to a pretty bright tempo— with both systems the bass drum should just flutter. If you're leaning into it with a funk kind of touch, you're dead. 

You can take this a step further and play the snare drum notes with an alternating sticking— each group of two or more snare hits after a cymbal hit— starting with the left hand (or two lefts, if doing the optional filler in patterns 6/9. There's room to develop that more if the reading materials have more space in them— like in Chuck Kerrigan's excellent Syncopated Rhythms book. 

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Leading with SD/cym accent

I don't know what to call this category of thing— I was listening to some Jack Dejohnette, where he would play something on the snare drum, beginning with a unison accent on the snare and a cymbal. And with no air between the SD/cym accent and the snare drum stuff. Shades of Tony Williams in there too. It's sort of a unique move, that I've never worked on specifically. So these are some things to play around with to develop it. 

The “B” sticking of course means Both hands in unison. The only stickings that matter are at the front of the measure, pencil in whatever you like at the end of the measure. 

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Updated rock loops

Here is a link for my updated collection of rock loops, which I put together for one of my students. These should be easy for most people to play along with— no weird rhythms or figures. I left some of the weirder ones out from my original collection. And there are several new ones. Enjoy!  

On Effortless Mastery

Service announcement: the next couple of months will continue to be very busy for me, so I'll be posting irregularly for awhile longer. Quality of language will be unpolished, wisdom coarsely hewn, logic poorly articulated, as I dash these things off in order to post some damn thing. Maybe the site will get a lot better, who knows. This is a great time to write me with questions. 

When Effortless Mastery, by the pianist Kenny Werner, was published in the late 1990s, it was one of the first books to talk seriously about the inner game of being a jazz student and musician, getting into some lurking personal issues a lot of us have, or have had, in that pursuit. I got an advance copy at the time of its release, and digested it off and on for a number of years after that. More recently Werner released a follow up book, Becoming The Instrument. 

The title, Effortless Mastery, does not mean “becoming a master quickly without working at it.” It means “becoming effortless in the mastery you beat your brains out obtaining.” In BTI he clarifies:

Here’s what I didn’t say in my first book: It takes a lot of effort to become effortless!

I wish I had because many misinterpreted that book to mean that one did not have to practice to acquire virtuosity.

Dealing with the creative neuroses and inhibitions you develop while practicing eight hours a day trying to be great. The first 75 pages address the subject of fear related to the creative and learning processes— playing, listening, composing, practicing, and teaching. That part is quite useful. The remainder of the book gets into some pretty airy stuff, with a lot of affirmations, breathing exercises and long meditations on repetitive themes like “I am great, I am a master.” 

And he writes at length advocating an approach to technique involving total release— maybe a legit thing to study at the hands of the master who taught it to him, but a technical experiment for people self-teaching it via a book. Putting in the amount of time he suggests would be a pretty speculative venture. 

Becoming The Instrument goes a lot further into a quasi-religious/self-help zone. You can tell when a musician bought one of the books, because they suddenly become God guy for awhile, taking on a forced kind of mystical air. We've all done silly stuff in the course of figuring things out. In processing it I think it's good to keep Zen master Shunryu Suzuki's advice close at hand: 

Do not be too interested in Zen. 

It gets quite heavy, and you get a sense of the intended audience, in the negative, as if he's addressing a kind of spiritual void, or void of purpose. Maybe he sees a lot a type of younger player, that is talented and driven, but is without a real visceral emotional center, without real meaning, with no great reason for doing any of this, beyond a desire for recognition. He fills that void with a kind of religion of playing, or of a particular state of being when playing. From here that resembles an extreme level of self-absorption— which is fine, but I don't believe it's a substitute for substance. And it doesn't provide it. I don't come away from it feeling I know more about what's real about myself.    

The book was very welcome when it was published, but there was a limit to how far I can go with it. I don't get much from affirming my greatness and mastery, the words aren't real motivating to me. I gained more confidence from real instances of me playing good than I was by the meditations. You learn detachment through playing more— burning out playing way too many gigs would be preferred. You hear yourself recorded enough times— on occasions when you hated what you were doing— and realize, after you forgot what you were trying to do, that you sound fine. Good even. You can play the drums, and your judgments about your playing are not your playing. I'll have to get into my ideas of what musical substance is, and where it comes from, another time. 

Both books are worth having in your permanent library. I included links above where you can preview the books quasi-legally, but you should buy them. Don't screw around, buy hard copies of everything. 

Reed tweak: filling in 16ths

Another in this endless series of tweaks to a basic RH lead system, commonly associated with the book Progressive Steps to Syncopation, by Ted Reed. Perhaps you've heard of it. 

Let's be clear, I am not screwing around daydreaming about new drum patterns here— this is about taking things we've worked out as isolated licks or patterns, and getting them into our playing by working them into an ongoing texture... which is provided by the Reed system. Learning any pattern or lick in isolation, the hard part is always how do I get this into my playing naturally. This is it, baby.  

Or it's one of the its. Today's thing extends and connects with a paradiddle inversion tweak we did a couple of years ago. And it's slightly different— here we're busying up the cymbal rhythm— or the bass drum rhythm— by filling in some more 16ths.

 

In playing the normal RH lead system reading from Syncopation, generally there will be one, two or three notes of left hand filler. Parts A, B, and C above show possible ways of handling them. At the bottom of the page there is a three bar excerpt from Syncopation Exercise 1 on p. 38, written out the way it would be played with the first cymbal option. 

The one thing this page doesn't address is when there are two or more BD/cym notes in a row— in the example you just play them as 8th notes, but you could fill in between them with the left hand to make them 16th notes. That would give you an unbroken 16th note texture. 

I associate all of this type of stuff with Jack Dejohnette, Jon Christiansen, Bob Moses, but it's all over current drumming. 

Get the pdf

Just throwing it out there...

A quick observation, during this period of light posting:  

A pattern I've noticed when I see people selling off their boutique cymbals: they rarely include any Cymbal & Gong. Every other hip brand of boutique item, but no Cymbal & Gong. It's not because they're not out there. There are a lot of them in circulation. 

It's because most people who buy them use them forever. A few of them I've sold have ended up getting traded to another drummer, who loved them and they used them forever, but they're not just getting them and dumping them. In the case of one drummer on this last Germany trip, Cymbal & Gong was what he was dumping the other cymbals to get.  

This year has been a little slow, so I haven't been acquiring a lot of new stock, but these cymbals I have hanging around are great. People have to get excited to make a purchase, but how's this for exciting: I'm holding your career cymbal, that you're going to be happy taking to every gig, recording session, and rehearsal you do for the 10 years at least. I was excited at that prospect when I started buying them for myself. 

End of random sales pitch. More erratic posting of drum stuff coming...

Tresillo unit - 02

Here's an addendum to a set of stuff I posted back in January— the “tresillo unit.” That was basically a set of variations on a New Breed system. This is a loosely organized collection of things to further develop one of them, that was suggestive of a samba groove.

With these heavily constructed kinds of grooves, every small move and variation you learn becomes kind of a big deal. Changes in dynamics, articulations, and orchestration become a big deal. You can get by with them doing relatively little in terms of actually varying the parts.  

Pattern 1-2 are the plain system, with the right hand moving between the cymbal and the floor tom, and that system with a left hand part to use for the complete stock groove. 

Patterns 3-6 give some accents you can play with the left hand. 

Patterns 7-8 have the left hand doing a partido alto-type rhythm. 

With the following you can work through some of the reading in New Breed, playing the book rhythm with the left hand:  

9-12 show some right hand variations.

13-18 show some bass drum variations. 

Play the hihat where you like for a samba; I play it on the off beats. 

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Daily best music in the world: Louis Hayes with Cannonball

Here's an item from jazz writer Mark Stryker, which caught Peter Erksine's attention on Twitter. Cannonball Adderley playing a fast tempo with Louis Hayes on drums, on an Adderley record I've never owned, Nippon Soul.

Stryker says: “This duo with Louis Hayes is prime Cannonball, and one of the best examples of Louis' distinctive cymbal beat and how he's the link between Philly Joe and Tony Williams at this tempo.” 

You can hear what he's talking about, even if it doesn't work exactly that way— it's burning:

Very occasional quote of the day: form

“It is easy to forget that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamored of a woman, but also to be enamored of the Sonnet.” 

-C. S. Lewis

Reed tweak: BRL linear fill

Fun little item here, modifying the straight 8th right hand lead system commonly applied to the book Syncopation.

Where there are two or more 8ths of left hand filler, we'll play 16ths, starting with a BRL pattern (B = bass drum). On two 8ths of filler, play BRLB; on three 8ths of filler play BRLBRL. 

I've put all the fills on floor tom and snare drum to help make the sticking clear, but use any drums you want of course. Practice the warm ups, then do it within the right hand lead system while reading from Syncopation pp. 30-32 and 34-45.

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Genre rant

A small complaint on genre in music, that has been hanging around my drafts folder a long time. Whenever I'm slow to write any new stuff, and am desperate for content, I dump one of these on you. 

So, genre: I hate it. I'm not given to hyperbole, but the word and concept are death.  

Genre = stereotype
It's a terrible way to think about music. Normal people are happy and comfortable thinking in terms of stereotypes, and will judge an entire field of music based on half-hearing a few examples of it, but musicians need to deal with specifics. 

True genre music is niche music, subculture music— Surf, Chanson, Gypsy Jazz, electric Blues, Rockabilly, etc. They have their charms, and some legitimate works of art, but continued exposure to them leads to a feeling of sameness. What attracts people seems to be a vibe, rather than any memorable or unique musical moments. 

Example: listen to Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones— it's a lot of fun, and a great song. But getting deeper into the rest of the album it's on, boredom sets in. It's all a variation on a formula— and there's not enough substance to the formula to sustain interest over a 29 minute album. Every song can't be Blitzkrieg Bop. They're not good enough writers. 

Here, listen to this one, all of it: 

That mild boredom you're experiencing? That's genre. 

You get something similar checking out some surf music on the strength of the Dick Dale track Misirilou, as used in the movie Pulp Fiction, or checking out 1960s French pop after hearing Francoise Hardy's nice little song Le Temps de l'Amour. In junior high school some friends had some Ted Nugent records— they liked hearing power chords on the guitar, and you could get the records practically free through Columbia House. We got bored with that fast, and we were 14 years old. Genre. Bad writing.   

Maybe the highest expressions of genre is in world music, in the music of local cultures. You'll find areas of music where everything by one artist basically sounds the same. It may be great music, but they're doing one narrow thing. Carlos Embale in Rumba, and Luis Gonzaga in Baiao are examples of that. As an outsider it can be hard to listen to a lot of that just via recordings, without the live social aspect. 

Movies
In Barton Fink a writer struggles dealing with genre— he's a theater writer who moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter, and has been assigned the job of writing a “rasslin' picture”, which he has no idea how to do. He can't write formula, and nobody around him can comprehend that:

You could watch Akira or Ghost In The Shell, and think, hey, I could get into this anime business. Then you try to watch literally anything else in that world, and it's absolutely the worst, most insipid, repetitive, formulaic, boring crap product in the world. You have just moved from the world of specifics, which is the world of art, into the world of genre. 

Now go onto whatever streaming service you use and search for any real movie: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Repo Man, Down By Law, The Limey, Robocop, The Long Goodbye (yes, all Gen X guy-favored movies). Since they probably don't have the movie you want, they'll suggest some things “like” it, and notice how bloody wrong they all are. You have just witnessed the impossibility of algorithming art, of genre-ifying it.

What's not genre
Think for a moment: how many songs are there that are anything like Happy Together, Time After Time, Tax Man, When Doves Cry, Tears Of A Clown, Chain Of Fools, Pinball Wizard, Mexican Radio, Shock The Monkey, Sympathy For The Devil, I Wish, Sweet Jane, Don't Worry, Be Happy? Compare that Ramones records with Q: Are We Not Men? by Devo. They all go in the “rock” bins or the “R&B” bins, but they're unique works.  

The strength of American and British pop music is that within a basic framework, there's an attempt to be unique. Maybe they hit on a universal aesthetic as well, but mainly the music is not simply genre. The mission of pop craft is to hammer out a track that is instantly catchy and compelling, that demands repeated listening, that is also unique enough to stand out from everything else bombarding people's ears. 

The same is true of American Songbook tunes— the ones that are still played have something unique about them. The not-good ones are the same stock ii-V-I thing, and seem thin and not real satisfying when you play them. I can't think of any titles because I never thought about them ever again. Sonny Rollins is kind of perverse about playing bad tunes, so you could look in his catalog. 

Jazz is not genre
Jazz is the subject of a lot of genre thinking, but it is not genre— it's a field, a community, a lineage. When someone says I don't like jazz, or I like jazz, the correct response is, which jazz, what artist, what record? That's the only meaningful conversation to have about it. 

Duke Ellington is not genre, Miles Davis is not genre, Weather Report is not genre. There's only one Kind of Blue, Out Of The Afternoon, Out Of The Cool. You'd think, OK, most records are just 3-5 dudes playing tunes, then why is there only one Lester Young Trio, Milestones, Nefertiti, Real McCoy, Three Quartets, Trio Jeepy, Time On My Hands, Live At The Pershing?  

There are a few people who have recorded so many records you start to feel some of that genre type of boredom through over exposure, and maybe they didn't have a real special plan for any one record. I'm not naming names. Maybe they were on a European label that was excited about them, and they were touring a lot, and put out way too much. Can't say. I'm thinking David Murray. 


More regular blog stuff coming— I'm very busy with unrelated things, but I've also got some exciting new stuff brewing. Stick around. 

Straight 8ths in funk Afro 12/8

Something I'm working out, that needed to be written out to do it: straight 8ths on the bass drum within a funk-style Afro 12/8 groove. I work a lot with this whole area of groove. This is worth working through even if you don't have an application for it, it makes you put a fine point on your accuracy with your bass drum. 

Play the accent like a backbeat and ghost the rest of the snare drum notes. At first omit the circled notes on the cymbal with patterns 3-4 and bass drum with patterns 5-16, if it helps you get them. 

Get the pdf

Solo transcription: Billy Higgins - Third World

Here's a drum solo by Billy Higgins, from the tune Third World on Freddie Hubbard's album Bolivia. 

I've never played this tune and didn't count out the form. It starts with 8 bars of an ensemble figure with drum fills, which also occurs at the end of every solo chorus. The transcription begins with that section at the end of the piano solo, then Higgins's actual solo begins at bar 9. And you hear Higgins play the figure in the last 8 bars of his solo, then the band comes in with it on the head out. 

Snares off. 8th notes are swung, or half-swung. The bass drum is feathered through a good part of this; also there are some random hits I didn't notate. The hihat really isn't used at all, maybe one or two random notes I didn't notate. Look for places to add doubles when moving around the drums— like in measure 11, the first two triplet partials are played with the same hand. 

At measure 41 there's a little rhumba part that is difficult to notate There are a variety of sounds happening, and changes in pitch— which I didn't indicate. The regular Xs are rim clicks, the alternate Xs are played on the rim (possibly with the R instead of the L indicated), and the house top accents are rim shots. 

The sticking I've given should help you do something with it. Your left hand should be in rim click position with your palm resting on the drum, muffling it, and the right hand playing the head near the edge of the drum. I think the pitch changes result from moving the left hand across the drum— not from putting pressure on the head and changing its tension, but from changes in harmonics, from changing the position of his hand muffling the head. Experiment.  

Get the pdf

The solo starts at 5:18 in the track, or at - in the video of the full album below:

Very occasional quote of the day: Joe gives advice

“When I was playing the Vanguard with Freddie Hubbard, I went back to the kitchen and Philly Joe was there. He said, 'You're playing good. You gotta kick Freddie's ass, make his lips burn.' All the while Freddie was telling me I was playing too loud.”

-Lenny White, Modern Drummer interview by Aran Wald, 1977

Beats to fills

Here's a connecter idea, using some rock beats written normally, a la Funky Primer, but playing them as cymbal accents with fills, as in this rock fill drill— hitting accents on the cymbal/bass drum, and filling in 8th notes on the snare and toms. 

That latter thing has been a regular part of my teaching for several years, usually starting with the 8th note accent pages in Syncopation. Those pages are a little dull though. This way will be better because a) the rhythms are more interesting, and b) it will give students some ideas about where to take an ordinary written-out rock beat. 

It's quite simple. For example, with beat number 4 from p. 13 of Funky Primer: 

You hit the bass drum/cymbal notes as crashes, supported with the bass drum, and hit the rest of the 8th notes on... some drums. Snare or toms, TBD later: 
 

With beat number 8: 

You would play: 

As exercises, you'd play those fill measures some different ways: 

1. Right hand only 
2. Left hand only
3. Both hands in unison- two cymbals, two drums (or flams on one drum)
4. Right hand on cymbal / left hand on drums
5. Right hand on cymbal / both hands on drums

And the drum part could be played:

1. On the snare drum.
2. Moving around the drums in a set pattern you make up. 
3. Moving around the drums freely.. 

Here's how you could play those in a two measure phrase— one measure of the written beat, one measure accents/fills:

Students get way too hung up on what cymbal or drum they should hit— in the second measure you can take the snare line to mean any drum, and the cymbal part to mean any cymbal. Keep it simple until you can play it, then get creative. You can follow sticking systems 1-5 above at first, then wing it. 

Guy's cowbell beats

A page for a student, age 12, who bought a cowbell, and didn't know what to do with it. Basically two kinds of beats— basic rock beats, and a kind of Latin-rock beat with a cinquillo rhythm on the bell. We covered a number of these verbally in the lesson— several of them were his idea— this develops them further. 

Get the pdf, then get the vibe by listening to some Def Leppard: 

And Deep Purple:  

Embellished filler with RH lead triplets - 01

I'm pretty sure I've written something like this before, but navigating my voluminous archives is no easier for me than it is for you. This is a sketch of some ideas in an upcoming[??? -tb] book release I'm working on. It's part of a larger system, but for now you can work on them as individual patterns:

RH on cymbal / LH on snare unless otherwise indicated. The repetitive format here is for practice purposes, in real music you would mostly do these one time only as part of a larger swing or 12/8 texture. Move them around the drums however you like.  

Try them with this loop or this loop. For example of the type of playing I have in mind, see Jack Dejohnette playing on a couple of slow tunes on John Scofield's album Time On My Hands. 

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Mozambique inversions

Library item that occurred to me while writing that last post. That Mozambique bell rhythm seems significant beyond just using it to play a Latin beat, hence this page, running it through its inversions. Half of them. You want to be psycho about it you can get the remainder of them by playing the second measure first.  

On line 1 you can easily see how the rhythm is constructed: a single note plus a double, then a single plus three doubles, like: 

⦾  ⦿⦿  ⦾  ⦿⦿  ⦿⦿  ⦿⦿

The actual Mozambique rhythm, which is on line 3, is an inversion of that. As is another common rhythm associated with Guaguanco, on line 6:

I have of course shared endless other ways of applying these type so rhythms to the drum set.  

Also see this roundup page with a lot more of this type of thing— up to January '23, at least— especially the tresillo/cinquillo inversion pages, and partido alto inversion pages.  

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Elvinized Mozambique

An item I was working out with a student— making an Elvin Jones-like Latin groove/texture out of a Mozambique rhythm, for medium tempos, with swing 8th notes. It's an entry, just the first, most obvious things I could think of for taking the groove that direction. 

Swing the 8ths on everything here. At the top of the page is a Mozambique bell rhythm written Syncopation-style, then some basic left hand variations, which you can move around the drums however you like.

Then there is the bell rhythm written out as RH lead triplets— RH plays the complete cymbal part, LH plays the complete snare part. Which you can play as a fill at the end of the groove— note the circled bass drum notes on patterns 6-9, play them with those notes, and without them. As illustrated, you can end the fill with a cymbal/BD accent on 1, or on the end of beat 4.  

With item 10, as it says, play the hand parts with one, some, or all of the written bass drum notes. Try some combinations. We'll explore that more fully in another installment. 

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Building a hybrid Reed interpretation

A short item— that's all I have time for lately: some hybrid Syncopation-based systems are brewing, where we do one basic thing, and alter it one step further, creating some connections between ideas, and opening things up, so it's not pure formula. It also creates some problems in devising a consistent system, and with interpreting it on the fly, when reading the full page exercises. 

Here we'll use a bebop-type system based on 5-stroke rolls ending in a stick shot— similar to this one. Everywhere you see an 8th note followed by a quarter note, play a 5-stroke roll (starting with the RH) ending with a stick shot (R stick hitting L stick, which is pressed into the drum head). Play the remaining notes as taps, mostly alternating sticking— starting with the LH, after the stick shots.

So the first two lines of page 38 in Syncopation would be played like this: 

That leaves a lot of open single notes, which we can fill in in a different way— like with the stupidly-named paradiddle inversion stickings we did recently: RLLR/LRRL/RLLRLR/LRRLRL. Pick the appropriate-length pattern for the space you're filling. Add more alternating singles at the end of the pattern if you run into some longer spaces between notes. 

Here's how you could handle some single line exercises from p. 34 in Reed: 

Note that the 16ths can connect directly with the roll, but you don't go directly into the 16ths from the stick shot. Also, we have to plan ahead for what hand to start the 16ths with, so you end on the right hand, to make the roll. 

This is probably strictly a system for practicing one measure licks, using pp. 34-37 in Reed. If you try playing one of the full page exercises, you'll notice that a) it's pretty hard to interpret on the fly, and b) it's hard to know which hand to start the 16ths with. You would have to figure out which hand to start with, and mark it on the page. 

Listen to some Roy Haynes soloing, and have fun. 

Very occasional quote of the day: no such thing as better

“We have only to fight as well as the men who stayed and fought at Shiloh. It is not necessary that we should fight better. There can be no such thing as better.”

- Ernest Hemingway, Men At War


That book was compiled and edited by Hemingway during WWII, and was widely read by people serving the US military then. I found the quote in my father's copy, a 1952 paperback edition, which I believe he was reading when he was in the Korean war. It was directed at people who were actually having to do that stuff. 

In drummer terms, you could say we have only to play as well as Art Blakey on Somethin' Else, or Jack Dejohnette on Live Evil. Harvey Mason on Breezin', Billy Higgins on Rejoicing, you pick.  

You're thinking oh, really, is that all?, but it is done all the time. Like the thing Hemingway is talking about, in situations less famous than the one he mentions. The rest of us get to play as good as them sometimes. We may not get as many equivalent playing opportunities, and there are other things that go into making a player, a playing career, and historical profile, but we can handle our available situations as well as they would. 

We don't get to play better than them. You're not going to outplay Blakey by doing harder stuff, by having faster singles, or by executing better. Your favorite awesome drummer isn't going to outplay him. There may be other reasons for working on those things, but to be a better artist than him is not one of them.  

Daily best music in the world: four by Steve Gadd

Taking a moment to dispel a totally absurd impression of Steve Gadd that has somehow formed in recent years: that he is some kind of conservative “groove” player, which...

...no. He's extremely influential on the way drums are played now, and the epitome of what a modern player should be, actually— a great jazz drummer, and pop, funk, and fusion drummer, with an incredibly deep groove sense, and musical taste and creativity through the full range of expression possible on the drums. An incredible reader in the sense of handling arrangements creatively and excitingly, and sounding like pure foundation while doing that. 

I don't like getting into superlatives. Just understand, he's the s***. As big a deal as anyone else you can name. It's our job to listen a lot, and figure out why. 

Night Sprite, from Chick Corea's album Leprechaun, is the reason half the drum sets sold today include a 10" tom tom— it inspired a whole generation of fusion players to use them. Or Gadd generally did, and this is the track of his that features it most spectacularly. 

It's also an essay on why the RLLR-LRRL paradiddle inversion is awesome. 

...I don't mention those mundane things because they're the main things that are great about the record. I mention them because they're the only things you can say. The music itself is the explanation of how great it is, there's nothing you can say about it that isn't banal technical point. 

Three Quartets is another huge Chick Corea record— basically a jazz record, but they've brought in some fusion elements, and we've become unused to hearing this deep, fat, fusion-like drum sound in a straight jazz setting. Note that we hear lots of cymbal/bass drum unisons throughout this— all the right hand lead stuff we do leads into this kind of thing. All of that Reed stuff.

There's a lot with both hands in unison as well, on the snare drum and cymbal. And he does some exciting things with the cymbals alone, unsupported by the snare or bass— how he begins the piano solo, for example, after 1:10:

Slamming here, with an extended drum/percussion feature, playing live with saxophonist Tom Scott. It's easy to think of all of modern studio funk/fusion playing— that universal anonymous style— as basically people doing Steve Gadd, but through all of this listening we can hear different things happening, that the generations of influencees did not pick up on. The unisons between the snare drum and bass drum, for example.  

Another mundane technical note, this track has been famous with me for a long time for having the pataflafla-ed 6 stroke rolls— pataflaflas with doubles in the middle. At about 6:35. 

Silly Putty, the first thing in the video below, is not so well known now, but it's one of those era-defining tracks, like Herbie Hancock's Chameleon, or Palm Grease. There was a thing of inventing creative linear funk grooves on the drums at that time. I don't know if Gadd started it, but he certainly led it— you're aware of his famous 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover groove. 

Cool instrumentation there, a quartet (guitar, keyboards) doing the playing, plus nine horns hitting the arranged stuff. Note to self, hire the extra guys. If you listen to that record all the way through, that's Lenny White on the third tune, the rest of it is Gadd. 

Those are all pretty showy recordings, he is of course on a thousand other records. Maybe literally. You can look up more stuff from the 70s/early 80s especially. Do. 

Stewart Copeland interview

New interview with Rick Beato talking to Stewart Copeland, that is quite entertaining— he's an entertaining guy talking about things he knows about, like his own career. Here he mostly talks about how making all the Police records went down, and it's fairly illuminating. 

As much as these things ever are— most people can't tell you anything about what you liked about something they did. Usually making something involves a different set of concerns from just enjoying it, even enjoying as someone who makes music, and knows about music. Not everything is intentional, or under one person's conscious control. The illuminating part is finding out what he thinks he did.

It sounds like a large part of the story of The Police was in the conflict between Sting, having fully formed pop songs in mind, including the drumming, vs. Copeland fighting to have the percussion featured as a distinct voice.  

It's not surprising that in recording the first records he only got a few passes on each track. It's somewhat surprising how unformed the songs were at that point in the process— or how little information he had about them. I think that accounts for a good part of the unusual playing decisions on the records— there are things people might not play if they knew everything that was going on.  

It's also not surprising that he approached them like a player, playing each take differently, and not as a songwriter or producer, who would be more concerned with crafting a perfect “part”... which would take you to a product more like Nirvana's Nevermind, with every note of the drumming performance worked out in advance. A drummer working everything out for percussive effect might lead you to something more like a Rush record. Whatever those Rush records are, they're a clear picture of what Neil Peart would do on purpose on that piece of music. On the Police records it seems that every percussion effect is not something Copeland created himself deliberately— or did deliberately while he was playing it. As he says, they did a lot of editing and overdubbing. 

We're in kind of a funny position, as people who like the drumming on those records— it's our job to do things like that as informed playing decisions, even as the original guy actually may not have.    

Anyway, interesting interview, it is worth listening to the full hour of it, despite Copeland's flippancy, at times.  

15th anniversary at Revival Drum Shop

I had a nice time hanging out at Portland's Revival Drum Shop last night— an excellent, unique drum shop featuring mostly vintage gear, with a lot of interesting new percussion instruments, and new and vintage cymbals. They helped Cymbal & Gong get going early on, and still have their proprietary Revival line of cymbals with them. It's a great store and I send all my students there. 

It's owned by José Medeles of the band The Breeders, and it has become a real Portland institution. Last night they had a running party with friends of the shop playing, including: Dave King (Bad Plus, Rational Funk), Dave Elitch[!!!] (Mars Volta, Miley Cyrus), Spit Stix (Fear), Stephen Hodges (Tom Waits), Janet Weiss (Sleater Kinney) and others. I had to leave before the great Mel Brown played— naturally, he was playing a regular gig somewhere, and had to go last.   

Dave King, if you know of his Rational Funk series of videos, was completely hilarious, and of course played brilliantly. 

Dave Elitch played great, hitting some real LA style backbeats that had me plugging one ear, because I was ~ five feet away. His recent mini-to-do involving a rash comment on the value of rudiments was mentioned, and he got a thank you from the audience for being relieved of the task of having to learn to play them. 

Spit Stix (aka Tim Leitch) did a mini-clinic on the 3:2 polyrhythm and on orchestrating rudiments on the drums— which he has worked out in a really effective way. He said the polyrhythm was really the primary beat he plays off of, which is a really central concept for me. As a drumming concept it's a big deal, it's the central thing in most jazz drumming since Elvin Jones. 

Stephen Hodges played a brief solo, then played duo with José, which was really lovely, getting into some quite amazing sounds within an atmospheric swamp groove, including Hodges dragging chains on the drums— missed getting video of that part, I was too transfixed— and José playing I think a 26" Wuhan cymbal.

I got a little video: 

It was cool and interesting to see how much of the old rock & roll thing is still happening with people, like it hasn't gone anywhere. You could have gone to a clinic with the guy from Paul Revere & The Raiders and he would have been playing much of the same stuff, and it's great. It's a thing. 

Everyone was winging it, with several admitting (or claiming) to feeling nervous about it, and it was loose, rough, and good. You can't help but notice that not everyone's real job is to be amazing playing a solo in a clinic. Like watching Stephen Hodges you think well I could basically do that, that must mean I'm a happening guy, except: he's the guy on Rain Dogs, Swordfishtrombone, and Mule Variations. He's the person who got in a position to be asked to make those records, and then made them what they are. That's a whole different thing. That's a whole different kind of artistic life than just getting ready to sound amazing in a drum shop. 

Or, I can listen to Dave King play his stuff solo, and it's on a very high level, but it's on a continuum with what a lot of other good drummers do, including myself. So just taking it in terms of playing solo, you could get a little cocky, like hey I'm not that different from him, I'm a happening guy! Except his job is to be headlining jazz festivals, and blowing the audience away after they've been listening to other world class acts for three days. To be good at that you have to be really comfortable doing hard music, and have a couple of gears above normal good players for generating intensity within music. So no. That's not the only way to do music, but no. 

And it's funny— even at his level, he's worrying about the parts that felt off to him, afterwards he was thanking the audience for listening to “the bad along with the good”— “the bad” being virtually undetectable to anyone listening. 

Ultimately you come away from the event feeling like there's room for everything— that obvious, explosive kind of talent, along with more traditionally simple and direct heavy playing, and some more mysterious creativity, reaching into a deeper living history with Mel Brown. A very cool scene. 

Ruffs, drags, and general correctness in snare drumming

The correct way to play ruffs (or drags if you prefer) on the snare drum is an extremely attractive topic for repeated, endless debate. Evidently. I've seen it again and again, people going nuts for the topic. 

The major burning issues seem to be: 

a) What they should be called— ruff or drag.   
b) How to play the embellishment— double stroke, multiple bounce, or...?

Around here we call them ruffs, and my concept of correctness playing them came from a kind of Charles Dowd / Tony Cirone / Fred Sanford axis. Mainly, most of my teachers and corps instructors, and many professional acquaintances, were students of one or all of them. Dowd and Sanford both studied with Cirone. Dowd and Cirone both studied with Saul Goodman— primarily known as a timpanist, but played and taught all orchestral percussion instruments. He's as important a figure as anyone in modern percussion. All four of those individuals taught many thousands of professionals over many decades, so there's a sizable community of players for whom this is part of their frame of reference, at least. 

Summarizing my views, and what I teach, this is from Cirone's book Orchestral Techniques Of The Standard Percussion Instruments: 

Except: in drum corps, we played them multiple bounce, not double stroke, with the buzz very tight against the main note. I believe that way of playing them in that setting was likely Fred Sanford and Bob Kalkoffen's innovation. More traditionally they were played with a double stroke. 

Also in corps: in practice, the term drag didn't refer to a specific rudimental pattern, but to a single metered open double played as part of an ongoing rhythm, which might be referred to as a drag passage, like: 

A real traditional rudimental geek could analyze each of those phrases as a series of named rudiments,  and I'm glad I never learned that way. For me this was always just a continuing rhythm with some of the strokes doubled. In fact there are some passages from traditional rudimental solos that could be interpreted that way, with the drag strokes metered. This line from Charley Wilcoxon's Roughing The Single Drag:  

Could be played: 

 

Continuing with the common ruff (or drag) here's another excellent description from Percussion For Musicians by Robert McCormick, edited by Cirone: 

So McCormick and Cirone are talking about interpreting that notation, and performing it on the snare drum in orchestra, wind ensemble, and other concert snare drum settings, and that is my baseline standard for how to do things. There are other reputable professionals who say they should be played with a double stroke— they are amply represented on YouTube— all you have to do is think the word ruff and you'll be presented with a lot of videos telling about that. I think they are offering incomplete information if they don't mention anything about the performance context. 

Friend/friend of the site and excellent drummer Ed Pierce (and author Alain Rieder) has pointed out that there is a Porcaro/Igoe/Henry Adler/Al Lepak lineage of players who refer to any three note single stroke pattern as a ruff. Ralph Humphrey as well. That's different from what we've been talking about— you would not read a snare drum part, or etude, with the above ruff notation and automatically play them as single strokes. In fact I don't know how that interpretation would be applied to written music, other than to assign a rudimental name to a written rhythm (calling a 1e& 2e& rhythm ruffs, for example). With this usage we're just giving that name to a simple rhythm structure, a cluster of three notes. 

There is an exception: you do play ruffs as alternating singles when you encounter that notation for most other percussion instruments— timpani, for example. 

This all may beg the question: what even is the purpose of doing it one way or another? Why does doing it “correctly” according to a certain school of thought matter? Who decides what's correct to begin with? 

I don't believe there's any real technical or hand-conditioning benefit to doing it one way of the other— it's purely a question of convention, taste, and musical effect and expression. 

If you're involved in concert snare drumming, you'll be working with conductors, band directors, other percussionists, professors and other teachers, and miscellaneous judges— via competitions, juries, auditions— each of whom may have opinions or demands about how you should play, which may be difficult to ignore completely.   

In rudimental drumming it is decided by the individual organization— marching bands, drum and bugle corps, other drum lines, will each have their individual style standards that players need to follow. Much of the rehearsal process is about learning those standards, you don't necessarily need to have them prepared in advance. 

As individual players, we're generally free to do whatever we want—  hopefully guided by some kind of sound idea, and a good musical ear. Generally it's best to to have a baseline of ability that fits with what the rest of the drumming world is doing, doing things the way other good players do them, until you're experienced enough to form a different idea about it. Someone doing something in a grossly unconventional way in a formal performance setting is most often taken as evidence the player doesn't know what he or she is doing. 

Postscript: In the comments there's a good question about diddles as distinct from drags. 

Groove o' the day: Elvin waltz by Kenny Washington

Here's Kenny Washington playing an Elvin Jones-type of waltz groove on Simple Waltz, on Clark Terry's 1991 record Live at the Village Gate. It's kind of an obscure item now, I bought the record then to check out some Kenny Washington. I used to play along with it a lot. 

It's actually really Elvin like, though Washington has a different way of playing time from him— and sound, and touch. See my groove o' the day and transcription of John Coltrane's Your Lady. There's also a page o' coordination based on it. 

On the intro he plays the ties, when the band comes in he plays the straight cymbal rhythm as written, no ties.