Quarter note-ism

The usual theory of practicing is that as you master really hard stuff, you'll be super-good at the easy stuff. What often happens is that hard stuff just starts sounding like normal drumming to you, and you don't take easy stuff seriously, never really learn to do it well, and it never becomes fully a part of your palette. But the easy stuff makes the music groove, and it makes it easier for other people to play with you, and makes the dense, advanced stuff more effective by way of contrast. It should also be exciting that this is an area of playing where there should be no technical barrier to fully free, creative playing.

So, I've written some four measure jazz comping phrases using all quarter notes and rests:

Play the exercises along with the standard jazz ride/hihat pattern, or whatever ostinato you like. The stems-up line is the snare drum, and the stems down are the bass drum. If you have any trouble with these, you can run all of the quarter note exercises in Syncopation as preparation— it's a good idea ot do that anyway. Here are some things I would try to incorporate:

1) Play four measures of time after each time through an exercise.
2)  Play the top line on the snare drum, no bottom line.
3)  Play the top line on the bass drum.
4)  Play the top line on the snare, bottom line on the bass.
5)  Play the top line on the snare, fill in all the rests in the snare part with quarter notes on the bass drum. So line 1 would be played like this: 

6) Accent the end of the exercise on beat 4, with a long note tied through the following downbeat. Come in with the time on beat two of the new phrase: 

7) Also play the exercises rock beat-style, with straight 8th notes on the hihat or cymbal. Play them along with recordings at various tempos. (Whoops— typo in the example, but you get the picture.) 

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Survival chops: triplets in 5/4

Part of the idea of this “survival” series is to be very right hand (or leading hand, if you play lefty) oriented; we want to start every measure with the right hand— it just suits the needs of playing music on the drumset better. An awkward thing about playing alternating triplets in odd meters— including 3/4— is that every downbeat lands on the opposite hand from the last. So to make that right hand orientation happen here, so we can feel a little freer with this type of thing, we'll play a sticking of RRL on beat 5. We also could've used RLL, but RRL is a little hipper.

Many of these will sound rather far out your bandmates' ears, and you could lose them— not every single pattern is practical vocabulary— but having played through them you'll be much less likely to accidentally play something that gets you lost.

An easy modification of this would be to play doubles on all the unaccented notes, except for the two rights in row on beat 5. You could also pencil in whatever drags or flams you want. A reasonable workout with this page would be to play each exercise 2-8 times, going on to the next one without stopping; you could do that at two different tempos

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Survival chops: triplets and 16th notes, accented

Here's a page of stuff that should be handy, with some accented 8th note triplets and 16th notes in 3/4 time. Playing 16th notes at the end of a run of triplets is something I do a lot; it's rather an Elvin Jones thing, and it gives you a lot of forward motion into the next phrase. It's like a little accelerando.

Putting them at the end of a three-beat phrase of mostly-triplets, as we have them here, is also helpful because it lets you start and end with the right hand. On the Internet it's an article of faith that you “have” to be proficient enough that it doesn't matter which hand you use, but in real playing it takes mental energy to end with the left hand, or to start with the left hand so you can end on the right.

Use an alternating sticking, starting with either hand. On the drum set, you'll use them most starting and ending with the right hand. I've also given some optional stickings; or you can pencil in your own.

Playing the patterns on the drums, you can put the accents on the cymbal, plus bass drum:

You can also stick the 16th notes either of these ways, with bass drum on the end:

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Survival chops: cymbal and bass drum licks

Here is a collection of moderately easy, very functional, right-hand lead licks for the drum set. Normally I would arrive at these by other means— like, by playing Stick Control, Syncopation, or any paradiddle rudiment, with the right hand on the cymbal, with the bass drum playing in unison. You can make major workouts out of any of those. But I wanted to write them in “Chop Buster” format, as a single column of composed patterns, representing about fifteen minutes worth of practice, after you've had a basic introduction to them.

Play the unaccented snare notes softly, and don't overplay the accents. You should have little problem learning these quickly. They're designed to be easy to be played fast, too, as long as your doubles with your hands and right foot are together. The metronome marking of 140 beats per minute is a reasonable goal— you may be able to play them faster than that, or it may take you some time to reach that tempo.

There are no repeat signs, but assume each pattern is to be played many times. In the pdf there are some examples of ways of practice them along with any time feel of your choice, in any style, like:

Or, using a partial measure of the pattern:

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Survival chops: six-stroke rolls

Or as I usually call them, “Swiss” sixtuplets— that's my own coinage, based on  an overheard  conversation between two drum corps legends, George Tuthill and Alan Kristensen, who were my corps director and percussion instructor in 1984-85. George was mentioning to Alan that Swiss rudimental drummers play sixtuplets not as singles, as Americans do, but with the RLLRRL sticking. I don't know if that's accurate, or even if I heard him exactly right. It doesn't matter; I still call them that. Usually in the US they're referred to as six-stroke rolls,

I guess we'll put this in the old “survival chops” series; these are very easy to play, and fun, and you will quickly come to rely them as a primary go-to lick for soloing and more dense fills.

Hopefully the formatting isn't not too hard on the eyes. When using these on the drumset, try catching a cymbal on some or all of the accents, along with the bass drum. A hip, fusiony lick of Dave Weckl's is to play the second double in the pattern on the bass drum. Have fun.

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Survival chops: right hand lead

This is the second in an extremely short series covering the bare essentials of what you need for “drumistic” fill, variation, and solo material across a variety of styles— you can read the intro to the previous entry to get a sense of what I'm about here. Usually you arrive at these patterns via a Reed interpretation, but for my purposes here I wanted to present them in their complete state:

Play these with your right hand on the toms, snare, and/or cymbal with the bass drum in unison. Run them in a moderate-to-fast 4 (two or three notes per foot tap, that is), and in a moderate 2 (four or six notes per foot tap). Try to get off of the page as quickly as possible— there are actually only a few basic moves for each rhythm, and you should be able to improvise with these “by feel” pretty quickly.

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Survival chops: accented 8ths

This is never too far from my mind anyway, but playing a salsa gig this weekend it occurred to me how little advanced chops are required in most musical situations. What is usually required is bonehead familiarity with really obvious stuff, because a) when playing unfamiliar music with a band who doesn't know you, it's best to keep it simple, and b) usually it's the best thing musically anyway. Your artistry in this case comes from all of the elements of musical development other than playing more complicated crap; like playing functional but musically powerful parts with great timing, feel and sound, and getting the maximum effect with your dynamics and orchestration of the drumset, to name a few.

So what I'll be attempting to do with this series is identify and present as concisely as possible some key stuff needed for playing regular gigs. We'll start with a simple page of accented 8th notes, played in cut time:

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Practice suggestions after the break: