Thursday, April 11, 2019

EZ linear quarter note rock method

I may have written this up before, but I can't find it in the archives, and I probably didn't include the embellishments I'm going to tell you today, so what the hell, let's do it again.

This is an easy rock method using the linear quarter notes pages from Progressive Steps to Syncopation— that's “Lesson 3” in the new editions of the book, or pp. 8-9. For once we'll actually use the written bass drum part— I almost always ignore the stems-down part in the book. Do the following things with exercise lines 1-15, plus the 16 bar exercise. You should quickly be able to play exercises all the way through without stopping. If you have my book Syncopation in 3/4, you could also do this drill with the equivalent patterns in that book.

For the examples we'll be interpreting line 3 from the book:




The first step is extremely simple: play the book as written, add 8th notes on the hihat:




This is how I'll write the rest of the examples— I like to put everything on the same set of stems:




Next add some more bass drum; first on the &s after the snare drum hits:




You could also add it on the & before the first snare hit:




No reason you can't do some other rhythms, like the a of the beat after the snare hits:




Plus the a before the first snare hit:





You can also add these other rhythms after the snare hits:




There's no reason you have to do only one of these things at a time— once you're basically familiar with the method, you should be able to improvise your own combinations. The method is so easy you'll probably get tired of it before you run all the combinations exhaustively. It's fine; the goal is just to play the patterns in the book with some improvised embellishments. Play through it with one of my practice loops

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