Friday, March 21, 2014

Afro 6/8: a Stone-based method

First, sorry if you want to read about stuff other than this Afro 6/8 thing— you can always do a fresh root-through of our voluminous archives— I happen to be working with this a lot, coming from a lot of different angles. So here's a little Stone application which occurred to me while playing this 6/8 groove (Rumba Columbia, specifically) out of Ed Uribe's The Essence of Afro-Cuban Percussion and Drum Set:




I thought it would be easy/fun/challenging to apply stickings from the first section of Stick Control to the eight notes of the snare and bass drum parts. I play the Rs with the right foot, and the Ls with the left hand, so you would arrive at the above pattern with exercise 4, on page 5 of Stick Control, LLRR LLRR.

Here's the basic right hand/left foot ostinato; the accents will apply only to the bell pattern throughout this method:




Playing exercise 1 on page 5, with a sticking of RLRL, would look like this:




Just to be clear, the written sticking just illustrates how the pattern reflects the exercise out of Stone; you're not playing the sticking with your hands.

Exercise 5, RLRR LRLL, would be played like this:



And exercise 14, RLRL RRLL:



This is should just be an easy little change of gears from the sorts of things we've been doing with the POCs, and should introduce a slightly different way of improvising within this feel. Since there a lot of exercises in Stone, with a lot of redundancy, I would not bother doing our usual tom moves here— I would just plow through as many exercises as possible.


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