Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Tom moves revisited

I've been using these moves around the drums a lot in my own practice-- if you've been working with the Elvin's Afro Waltz series, you probably have too-- and have evolved them slightly, so I thought I'd share that with you. As you can see here, I've added some inversions of the main moves:

Key:
S = snare drum (normal stroke, or rim click)
H = high tom
L = low tom

Between two drums:
S H S H / H S H S
S L S L / L S L S
H L H L / L H L H

Away from/back to one drum:
S H S L / H S L S / L S H S
H S H L / S H L H / L H S H
L S L H / S L H L / H L S L

Down / up the drums, or clockwise / counterclockwise: 
S H L / H L S / L S H
S L H / L S H / H S L

The reason for the extra inversions is that when doing a moving part with the same number of notes per measure as there are in the move, the resulting pattern will start on the same drum every measure. So, you may want to explore some other possibilities. It takes more time to do the extra patterns, so I do them when I want to hear something else happen musically with a pattern; I don't necessarily do them routinely. There's certainly no need to do them when the pattern starts on a different drum every measure/repeat.

One more thing: You could do these with one note only per drum, but I will generally put doubles or multiples on one drum, and do the moves when there's enough time to make them easily. So, this pattern from the first installment of the Elvin thing:


...would be played like this when using the SHL move:

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