Omar Hakim speaks to Modern Drummer when he was with Weather Report in the mid 80s:
RT : How did you learn to play bop so fast?
OH : I don't know. With much difficulty. No, with me, playing fast is a relaxation thing. You start to come up with tricks to get that right hand moving. And then it's not always the cymbals; you've got the hi-hat you're working with. To play that kind of bebop is a hands thing. The bass drum is giving the accents and dropping the bombs during the solos. The bass drum is weaving. “Fast City” is one of the fastest songs I've ever played. There were a couple of songs I did like that with Mike Mainieri, but you learn your tricks for doing it.
RT : But it's funny you would say you had to relax to play at that speed.
OH : You've got to relax. Before you tense up, you've immediately got to say it's not fast. Victor and I had a long discussion about that when we were learning it. Don't think of it as fast. It's not fast. Never mind the fact that you're going to pass out when it's over; it's not fast.
Here's the tune he's talking about— Fast City by Weather Report, here with Peter Erskine on drums:
This is the first in a multi-post series outlining some ways of using Progressive Steps to Syncopation to do a samba. I usually use actual Brazilian rhythms for that, but many of the rhythms in Reed work too.
The first thing is a preparatory exercise for doing a surdo-type part on the tom toms— a basic structure for that feel, and a couple of rhythmic moves that will occur when working out of Reed. Typically this involves a high drum on 1 and a low drum on 2 (counting in 2/2), and sometimes a low drum on the whole last half of the measure— at the end of a two, four, or eight measure phrase. The sticking is simple, but it does have to be worked out to catch the right drum at the right time.
Accent the toms, especially the low tom on 2. Play the snare drum hits generally quietly, adding some accents as you see fit. You can also play rim clicks on the snare drum. I was doing this with the Hot Sand loop, which is a pretty bright tempo.
Put this in your binder with Kenny Clarke's fours from Love Me Or Leave Me that I posted a few years ago. Here he's trading fours on Two Not One from the album Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh. For some reason he has me thinking about Philly Joe Jones— I never thought about Joe being especially a Kenny guy, but I'm feeling a strong semblance here. The tempo is bright, fours begin at 3:55.
As usual, Clarke doesn't play the tom toms at all. The triplet lick in the first two lines, that happens several more times, I suspect is played with a paradiddle sticking starting with the left hand— either LRLLR or LRRLR (I prefer the latter). At the beginning of line 3 play five-stroke rolls ending with stick shots. On the last two measures of line 5, you can start with our previous paradiddle lick, then two double paradiddles, then singles. Or do the whole things as singles. Pencil in whatever sticking you want to use. Use a RRL sticking on the triplets in line 6. The four-stroke ruffs in line 7 are some little personal flash lick of Clarke's; what I wrote appears to be what is played— you can really play them however you want.
Making videos of some new cymbals for sale today, so it's a good time post this thing that has been sitting in my drafts folder for some months:
In selling these fantastic Cymbal & Gong cymbals, I've been trying to work out how to advertise their strength: how well they do their actual job as musical instruments. All of the other professional players who play them say the same thing: they sound like cymbals— they sound like 95% of records we ever listen to.
It sounds obvious. Don't all cymbals sound like cymbals? Not always. It's a big deal. They sound like cymbals the way Charlie Haden sounds like the bass. Sounding the way the instrument is supposed to sound can be pretty rare.
In the cymbal-enthusiast world the sought after sounds tend to be sweeping, lush, dark... bottomlessly dark. Big amazing sounds that stand out from all the other big amazing sounds in the drum shop. This is a community of people buying 22 and 24 inch crash cymbals— useless items at any other time in history— dreaming about 26 inch cymbals, edge wobble, bendability. People love brutally bending the crap out of cymbals to demonstrate... something...
The sought-after sounds are dwaaash and whooosh. Sort of a bwaaaah or a durshaaaah sound. If you can get a good bwaaaaorrrsssh with a single stroke of a 7A, you know you've got something. The presence of a bizarre slinky-like tonality is regarded as very interesting.
The problem: I can't use any of that in actually playing music. I'm a player. I can't use a cymbal that goes dwaaaah when I play it at a mp, and GWAAAARRR???when I play a mf. I can barely use the first sound, the second one is right out. I see a lot of cymbals like that in drum shops. On the rare occasion that I hear a cymbal like that on a record, it's usually a distraction. It sounds out of place.
Musical needs
What music normally requires from the cymbals are a ride sound, a crash sound, and a bell sound. With ride cymbals we also need an accent sound— with the shoulder of the stick, not a full-on crash. A crash cymbal needs to give an explosive crash sound, and be usable for light riding. With hihats, a solid foot sound and open sound, and a closed sound played with a stick. Some people also play a bell sound on the hihat. It's a nice bonus if we can get a good crash out of the hihats. From a Chinese-type cymbal we need a short trashy crash sound, and perhaps some kind of ride sound, while not being too wild or obnoxious.
Playability
The best cymbals— or the best cymbals for you— produces those sounds at an appropriate volume for the situation, the way you normally play, with your usual sticks. Playing your normal situations shouldn't demand any special care in how you hit the cymbal.
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Being the what
Music is always about what is played. Sound is important, but it's secondary to what is played, in what context. The sound has to communicate the what, not be the what.
Sounds that “are the what” are known as effects. The point of them is to make one special sound that jumps out at the listener. Nobody wants to have the one crazy sound leaping in their face all night, so they have to be used with some care. As Peter Erskine said in another context: sounds that are too “interesting”, used too much, can be like bad wallpaper. Or like reading a novel rendered in a “cute” font.
Strictly business
I know we're all serious artists here, but playing the drums is also a job. We are buying tools for doing a job, and big purchases for things like cymbals need to make some kind of business sense. Our tools need to be versatile enough to handle a significant part of our performance obligations. I can't be spending $700 on something that is only usable, with great care, in a narrow range of situations... and even then, if you poll the band, it may not even be doing that very well.
Drummers don't usually have a lot of money. When we buy something, we need to be able to use it happily forever— or for many years, at least.
Getting into doubles with my hemiola funk series— two notes in a row at 16th note speed on the same drum/cymbal. Using the same format as the last beginner sheet, which I've found to be effective with my younger students.
Patterns 13 and 14 are the essential idea we're developing; patterns 1-12 isolate the elements, and begin playing them in sequence. Patterns 15-28 put the idea in 2/4 (with inversions) and 4/4, and re-orchestrate it slightly.
Play patterns 1-12 several times, with an unmetered rest in between repetitions— play it once, take a breath, and play it again. Play patterns 13-28 one time as with 1-12, then play them repeating.
A couple of practice loops sampled from McCoy Tyner. The first is from Reaching Fourth; it's the vamp from Old Devil Moon, and at 142 bpm it's a nice medium tempo, good for working on any of your normal jazz materials:
Then a short excerpt from McCoy's solo on Song of the New World. Too short; do go listen to the whole album with Alphonse Mouzon on drums. Nobody really talks about the type of vibe that's happening here— high intensity blowing in a straight 8th feel— but it's as much of a thing as an “Elvin-type” feel, or an “ECM” feel. It's not Latin, not a samba, not funk, not anything else. You could call it a McCoy thing.
Tempo here is 220, which is kind of a crux tempo for this style— your right hand wants to imitate McCoy and play a lot of running 8ths, but it's a little too fast to do that the whole time; settling into a half time vibe also doesn't quite make it. You have to straddle the two.
Sorry I mis-titled it “Song FOR the New World” on the video.
Hey, the longest transcription we've done in awhile, here, a three pager. It's Jack Dejohnette playing on a very interesting record I had not really heard before: Peacemeal, by Lee Konitz, recorded in 1969. It's a quintet, with Konitz on alto and tenor, and some electronic device, and Marshall Brown on valve trombone and baritone horn. This is a jazz arrangement of Peasant Dance, from Bela Bartók's Mikrokosmos. This is the blowing over a vamp starting at 1:20.
It was difficult at times for me to isolate the bass drum from Eddie Gomez's bass playing, so I probably left some out, or put some things in that were actually the acoustic bass. Dejohnette swings his 16th notes for much of this; relating that back to this recent post, that's equivalent a normal jazz tune played at quarter note = 230— getting towards the upper limit for swinging the rhythm.
After the recent Max Roach series, I like the idea of making study guides based on transcriptions— maybe I'll get to that later in the week.
There's a lot of confusion among drummers on the internet over what “BPM” means. I don't want to have to re-explain it every time I mention it, so I'll link back to this as necessary.
It means beats per minute. It does not mean notes per minute. Drummers on the internet like to talk about speed, and talking about numbers of notes gives you higher numbers, which makes it more fun, so they talk about numbers of notes. It's become a thing largely thanks to Metal drumming and the World's Fastest Drummer competition, and it's a symptom of people not understanding how rhythm, meter, and music work generally.
A beat is the primary felt pulse of a piece of music. If people were dancing or marching or tapping their feet, it's the pulse they would be dancing/etc to. If there were a conductor, it's the thing his or her conducting pattern would be marking.
A legit tempo or BPM indication consists of a number + what kind of note the number refers to, e.g. quarter note = 100 beats per minute. If the note value is not indicated, it is assumed that the number refers to the normal beat for the time signature of the piece, e.g, quarter notes in */4 meters, dotted quarter notes in regular */8 meters, half notes in */2 meters.
For talking about speed without a specific musical context, I give the rhythm value, the beat value, and the tempo, e.g 16th notes at quarter note = 120. Sixtuplets at quarter note = 140. The default beat value is typically quarter notes. Absolute speed of notes as a statistic, without a rhythm or beat reference, is for me not musically meaningful— there's no reason to assign numbers to that, unless people are just into training for its own sake.
Another original syncopation exercise. The last one had single notes, spaced one or two 8th notes apart. This one has one or two notes in a row, one or two 8ths apart. Both are really designed for speed when playing the right hand on a cymbal (often with bass drum in unison) or tom toms, with the left hand filling in— with that interpretation you never play more than two notes in a row with either hand.
I've been thinking about something the saxophonist Donald Harrison said in a clinic some months ago:
“Music is about vibe. Music is all about vibe.”
It was a useful comment for him to make in the context of critiquing a group of student musicians who had just given a very tepid performance of an often-played Jobim tune. Music may not actually be all about vibe, but for me the message was you have to think about vibe. Thinking about vibe means thinking like a producer, which means thinking about the total product, and how your music sounds to a general listener.
Being too much about vibe is also a current thing. I get most of my new music from Portland's excellent jazz station KMHD, and I hear a lot of stuff that doesn't make it for me, because it seems to be about nothing but a sort of feeling of non-specific hipness, with no real depth. It sounds like it was mostly created in post on a laptop, and I come away thinking “what is this for?”
I don't need any piece of music to justify itself with a purpose, but I should not be listening and thinking “this music has no purpose.” I don't know what this Decoding Society record is “for”, but it never occurred to me to think about it. It's just inescapably great and that's it. What is Song X for? It's just pure sonic art, no further justification needed.
And there are other competing issues, which you could say music is “all about”:
Groove, for example. Groove is not vibe, but often what people think is groove is really vibe. Groove is not about signifying something funky sounding. Defining it will have to be a subject for another post, but serious preoccupation with groove supersedes and forgives everything else good or bad about a piece of music.
Pop craft is its own thing, and is not vibe. Pop songs may have vibe, but specifically crafting something for effect on the radio, to hook listeners to want to listen repeatedly, is something else.
Genre is all-important for genre fans, who want one formula, repeated forever. Whatever originally attracted them to that music, they want that to continue, and something is good if it fulfills that expectation. For more discriminating listeners, genre pieces need to include some fresh element to make them sound like unique, memorable works.
Vocalists and featured instrumentalists have to think about how they render a melody; composers have to think about the pure application of melody and harmony. Those are not vibe, and you can succeed in those things without thinking about vibe. There's probably more, but I have things to do. It's something to think about.
A moderate samba groove using the tom toms, from one of my favorite Brazilian drummers, Milton Banana. He plays this briefly at the beginning, middle, and end of Samba do Perdão, from his album O Trio. Briefly is the only way to do it; the track is only 1:45 long. The entire record is under 29 minutes.
Here I've transcribed the groove from the end of the tune:
Note that there's no hihat played with the foot— as is often the case with a lot of drummers.
During the body of the tune he uses both of these one-measure grooves— mostly the first one, with the second one as a variation. A few times he plays them both in sequence (minus the rim click on the & of 4) to make a two measure groove.
This tune is the first one in the video, and the transcription above starts at 1:32. Banana has a way of sounding like a conductor when he plays figures and fills— the attitude feels different from someone who's just playing the arrangement.
A rhythm issue I've been thinking about is the equivalence of tempos and their halves and doubles. I was wondering how small a range of tempos would cover the entire practical range of performance tempos. A mathematically minded individual could probably figure it out in a second, if he knew anything about music. I checked, and he doesn't, so I had to actually think it through myself.
The answer is 52-100, which includes sixteen standard metronome markings:
52 54 56 58 60 63 66 69 72 76 80 84 88 92 96 100
Let's walk through it:
Standard metronome tempo range: 40-208
Before digital metronomes, that's what they used to mark on all metronomes. It's a realistic practical tempo range for most music.
Tempo range in actual performance: 25-400
At least, there are examples of recorded music in approximately that range. Tempos from 200-280 are common in jazz, tempos from 280-400 are increasingly uncommon. Quarter note = 400 is an extreme tempo, and is very rare. Let's consider that the outer limit of what a very ambitious jazz drummer will ever be asked to perform. We can have a conversation another time about whether a 400 bpm pulse can even be considered a “beat” in any meaningful sense.
You can decide for yourself how to approach very slow tempos. Dig into Shirley Horn's recorded works to get an idea of the practical lower tempo limit in jazz.
A total of 39 markings. Note that if we halve the values from 40-76— 80 and above are doubles of lower values— they increase in single bpm increments from 20-30, then 1.5 beat increments from 30-36, then a two beat increment from 36-38.
That's the answer: 40-76
We can derive all of the values above by doubling the values from 40-76. I've extended that to cover our entire range up to 400 bpm, or 54 markings:
More practical answer: 52-100
Most of us don't play or listen to a lot of tunes in the 40 bpms— it's not real familiar terrain, musically. The 52-100 range is much more common in day to day usage. Double everything twice, and half-time the tempos from 80-100 to get the metronome range plus the faster jazz tempos.
For slow-click practicers
Working with a slow click, regardless of the actual tempo you are practicing, is an extremely effective way of developing your time, so here are the 40-76 tempos halved.
20-30 (1-bpm increments)
31.5 33 34.5 36 38
Most metronomes won't let you use decimal points, so you'll probably have to get these by using the 40-76 numbers, and setting the device to give you downbeats every two beats, and then silence the quarter note pulse. If you're really sick in the head, you could do the 10-19 gamut by setting it do give you downbeats every four beats, and silencing the quarter notes.
Conclusion
So, the real range of tempos is fairly small, if you think in terms of this matrix-type concept. Being aware of it may help you structure your practice, and improve your concept of time and rhythm overall.
Let's start a little series here: some full page syncopation exercises, each designed for a special purpose. Good for fluency and ease of practice with certain practice methods, good for a particular challenge with others.
This one has single notes, quarter or dotted quarter (or equivalent) spacing— good for 2/2 or fast 4/4 8th note applications, or anything based on two and three note patterns. Excellent for playing with a bossa or samba feel. For triplet methods, the Ruff Bossa will be easy, the right hand accent/left hand fill way will be a challenge. Good for a floating feel with my Elvin-type method with broken triplets*. Not a lot of interest here for any long note/short note methods. Of course you can do anything with it.
* - I can't find the original link outlining my Elvinish broken triplet method, so a quick explanation:
A standard Reed method is to play the written melody rhythm on the bass drum; fill in the remaining triplet rhythm with the left hand on snare drum, add jazz cymbal rhythm and hihat on 2 and 4.
My way: Any time you would play more than two successive filler notes with the left hand, break it up by not playing any triplet partials on the downbeats. So your LH never plays more than two triplet-spaced notes in a row. You could also play only the middle partial with the LH when there's a bass drum on the &. I like to mix it up.
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“I used to call myself a free jazz drummer, now I just want to play tight arrangements.”
— Todd Bishop
“Hang on tightly, let go lightly.”
— The Croupier
This is an important idea for me— for developing and continuing to develop as an artist, but also practically for learning how to play. Ambitious students are aggressive about forming a concept of themselves, about getting ideas about how things are done, and about learning what they're turned on by, what kind of art they want to do.
The process is about finding things to be attached to, and then working really hard developing them. You get ideas like I'm an Elvin guy. I'm a free guy. I'm a “hard hitter.” Whatever. “This is my technique.” Eventually you have to let some other things in, or you become one-dimensional. The effect may be to just broaden your range, but you also may end up being into the exact opposite kind of work you thought was irrevocably “your thing.”
The pedant is a disturbingly-slender, reedy-voiced, scrutinous man.
There's a lot of confusion about rhythm, making the subject an easy target for low-grade, often barely-informed pedantry. See any internet music forum, or rehearsal of college age players, or gathering of amateur musicians.
Your hard-core rhythm pedant doesn't care if it's easy for people to do actual musical work, he cares about textbook precision— his version of it, anyway, because he may actually know jack squat on the subject. He just likes bringing conversations to a screeching halt and changing the subject to one he's comfortable with: music theory pedantry.
Sure to drive such people bananas is the useful idea of common time functional equivalence— referring to rhythm functions by their values in 4/4.
Most drummers learn early in their education that:
Quarter notes = “one beat” Half notes = “two beats” Whole notes = “four beats” 8th notes = the hihat rhythm— a two-note subdivision 16th notes = hand-to-hand fast notes— a four-note subdivision Triplets = the triplety things— a three-note subdivision
And so on. Simple, obvious references for rhythmic values. Students will be screwed for really understanding rhythm if they get too attached to them, but they're usable for initially getting it.
As you learn more, you discover that all of that always depends on the time signature. There is no blanket term for a one-beat rhythm, or for a two, four, or three note subdivision. For example:
In 2/2 (or cut time), a half note = one beat
In 12/8, a dotted quarter note = one beat
In 3/8 counted “in 3”, an 8th note = one beat
In 2/2, a quarter note = a two-note subdivision
In 3/4 counted “in 1”, a quarter note = a three-note subdivision
In 12/8, a quarter note = a three-note subdivision over two beats, the equivalent of a quarter note triplet in 4/4.
In 4/4, a three note subdivision = 8th note triplets
In 6/8, a three note subdivision = 8th notes
So, to talk about ordinary rhythmic concepts like beats and subdivisions, we either have to refer to the correct rhythm for the current meter (and interpretation of that meter), or we have to say two/four/whatever-note subdivision of the beat, and get into rhythmic terms that most people don't know. It's annoying, and tends to confuse students, and readers.
So for the sake of having a functional language for rhythm, I often use the common understanding of those rhythms, and refer to them by their values in 4/4.
This is not just for convenience because everyone is so poorly educated about rhythm; it's also an objective reference. 4/4 is called common time not just because a lot of music is written in it, but also because it's the native meter* for our system of notation. The whole note is the fundamental rhythmic value from which all the others are derived, and a whole note = one whole measure of 4/4 time. For our system of rhythm and meter, 4/4 is normal.
We're using 4/4 as a reference point in a similar way to other instruments using the major scale as a reference point when talking about modes and other types of scales.
The point of this is that in drumming, we have some common rhythmic functions like the beat, and the two note subdivision, and the four note subdivision, and the three note subdivision, and quarter note, 8th note, 16th note, and triplet, respectively, are the best known words for those things.
So regardless of meter, I may refer to notes of a four note subdivision as “functioning like 16th notes.” That comes up most frequently in 2/2, where 8th notes are the four note subdivision. As I mentioned in this post, 12/8 inherently uses a three note subdivision, which I'll refer to as a “triplet feel”, and refer to the parts of individual beats of 8th notes the same way I do 8th note triplets in 4/4.
You do have to educate people on the correct terms and theory, so I don't make these references casually. That's what hacks do. I use the words feel and functioning as, and explain what is meant by them.
* - Meter = time signature = time. The terms are practically interchangeable. I prefer to say meter. Time signature sounds like it refers to the written indication that tells you what meter the piece is written in, but I don't know any musicians who make that distinction. Musicians say time signature or time or meter or meter signature.
After Ginger Baker finally died the other day, I was thinking about his playing, and the playing of some of the other big drummers to come out of the late 60s. I listened to a lot of drum solos last weekend, and wanted to offer some notes on them.
It's kind of silly to talk about these like they're pieces of music; the idea was to make a spectacle out of the drummer going crazy and shaking his hair and blowing everyone's mind by going fast, for a long time. People used to mention how long the solos would go as evidence of how good they were. But they are music, too, and in any case, that's the only way I know how to talk about the drums. So here we go:
“Toad” - Cream - Ginger Baker
I don't think I've ever listened to this all the way through, nor the much longer solo on Wheels of Fire— I'm trying to listen to that as I write this, and I completely lose focus about every 15 seconds, and finally I just want to turn it off.
I don't enjoy Baker's playing, but he was clearly very influential. The previous big drum thing in rock was Wipeout, which is very Mickey Mouse by comparison. Baker is bringing sort of a Buddy Rich / Louis Bellson type of vocabulary into the rock world— he cites Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, and Max Roach as influences, but I hear nothing of them in his playing. To me it's a straight bam-bam style rendition of big band drumming.
Baker wrote the tune, and it's nice. Most things in this category seem to just be simple blues riffs with some solo breaks.
“Moby Dick” - Led Zeppelin - John Bonham
John Bonham was to all appearances a big, simple, heavy drinking British farm country lummox, but he was a real musician, and to me this is the best, most musically successful, of these types of solos. It's concise, it has very effective dynamics, and melodic and sonic interest, and it develops nicely. It made musical sense to me as a 13 year old, and it makes sense to me now. It's just a very effective, non-dumb rock & roll drum feature.
Part of what I like is that he is not just doing that big band thing, which so many of these drummers do— apparently that was the way young white drummers who were into the drums learned to play at the time. His concept of the instrument is different. His sound was also different, which perhaps we'll talk about another time...
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” - Iron Butterfly - Ron Bushy
This was a famous tune and drum solo in the 60s, that was largely forgotten soon after. It's not hip at all, but I kind of like it. I'm happy to not have to listen to a lot of snare drum junk. He's playing simple little melodies on the tom toms, and he doesn't repeat himself. All of these rock guys step on their bass drum the way he does, but he has a nice groove with it, and it hearkens back to Baby Dodds a little bit.
The solo starts after 6:15:
“Working Man” - Rush - Neil Peart
Peart is a generation after the other players here, but I wanted to put this up to compare with Ginger Baker's playing. To me this is coming out of that same big band bag, which is why Peart's thing always seemed a little retrograde to me, compared to Bonham's concept, which was more modern.
The solo is well composed. It had better be— he played this same solo for many years. Compare this performance with the one on Exit... Stage Left five years later. It's more of a production number, featuring his elaborate drumset, than it is a piece of music. Basically he's lining up a lot of fun drumming ideas and novel sounds in an exciting package. As a show number it's very effective.
The drummer, clinician, and technique expert Bill Bachman has just shared on the Drummerworld forum that he had a stroke recently, which took out his ability to use his right hand. For a drummer, that's like losing... name the most critical body part for any profession. It's that. He's optimistic about making a full recovery, in time, but this is certainly a good time to reach out and offer some encouragement.
UPDATE: Oops, I'm an idiot— I uploaded the unedited video from the meeting, which has lots of inane conversation on it in between playing cymbals. Below is the correct video, with times matching the cues below.
Video from yesterday's visit to Cymbal & Gong HQ. I got Holy Grail 22" (1) and 20" (2) rides, and 17" (2) and 18" (1) crashes, which will be available for sale on my Cymbalistic site. Videos of individual cymbals coming soon. If you hear anything you like, let me know ASAP— the ones I didn't get will be going out to other dealers soon. Hit EMAIL TODD in the sidebar.
The rides I got were in the range of light-medium jazz rides, some with the rounded K-type bell, some with the higher, squarish 50s A-type bell, all with a warm, clean, full jazz sound with good stick definition. The crashes are all thins, with excellent crash response, and a slight funky edge.
Visit Cymbalistic.com to see and hear what else I have in stock.
What's played, at what time: 0:00 - Leon Collection 20" Thin Flat Ride
Very glassy but complex, delicate sounding cymbal. 0:28 - American Artist 17" Medium Flat Ride
This looked like an 18", but Tim said it was 17". Very similar sound and feel to my old Paiste 602 18" Medium Flat Ride. 1:25 - Prototype: 20" Swish/China Type
I may have the size wrong— these two swishes may be 22s. 1:53 - Project cymbal: 20" “Dizzy Gillespie” Swish with cutout, drilled for 17 rivets
Very interesting “Swish Knocker” type cymbal, primarily intended as a ride. Sound improved as we added more rivets. The last time it is played here there may have been 10 rivets inserted. 3:19 - playing flat rides again 3:35 - Dizzy cymbal with more rivets added 4:00 - 20" Holy Grail Ride
All of the Holy Grails played here sounded great. 4:11 - another 20" Holy Grail Ride 4:20 - another 20" Holy Grail Ride 5:15 - 22" Holy Grail Ride 5:40 - another 22" Holy Grail Ride 5:53 - another 22" Holy Grail Ride 6:10 - another 22" Holy Grail Ride 7:30 - 17" Holy Grail Crash 7:47 - two more 17" Holy Grail Crashes 8:10 - 18" Holy Grail Crash 8:20 - another 18" Holy Grail Crash
UPDATE: Found some really great Holy Grails— 22" and 20" (x2) jazz rides, 17" (x2) and 18" crashes! Videos coming soon.
A couple of cymbal-related items:
• We're currently setting a date for an October Cymbal & Gong event in Seattle— a chance to get together with some drummers and hang, and play, and buy some really great cymbals personally selected by me.
Email me (see sidebar) or visit Cymbalistic to get on the mailing list for updates.
• I'll be visiting Cymbal & Gong HQ in southeast Portland today, selecting a few new cymbals for sale on my Cymbalistic site. I'll be looking for new 20" and 22" Holy Grail jazz rides, and 17" and 18" thin crashes.
There are also supposed to be some Leon Collection thin flat rides in this shipment. The Leons have been a very popular item recently, with a pleasingly bright, ECM-like sound somewhat reminiscent of a Paiste 602.
Hit the links above and check out what I have available, and let me know if there's a size, type, or sound you're looking for. The time to make your requests is now, when there is a fresh shipment in— these cymbals are not available in large quantities.
Listen: I've played a lot of cymbals, I'm picky about what I like, and I say with confidence: Cymbal & Gong cymbals are the s***. The real 50s-60s jazz sound. C&G's medium-weight cymbals are a true 70s sound, recalling Harvey Mason playing with Herbie Hancock. Anybody who follows this site will love them— this is what real cymbals for real players sound like.
For example: Dig this 16" Holy Grail crash, “Bastien.” It's a great funky little cymbal, and everyone who has played it loves it. Somebody buy this thing.
UPDATE:I'm going to keep bumping this to the top of the site this week, but I will be posting every day, so scroll down for new content.
It has been a long time since we've done any kind of a fund raiser, and since my car was just stolen— second time this year, believe it or not— maybe this is a good time to do one. I need to raise some money towards getting another modest vehicle that will be beneath the dignity of a thief to actually steal. Maybe a nice meal-colored 15 year old Kia.
I don't want to just beg for cash, so if you value what we do, and want to support the site, please avail yourselves of the following goods and services:
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Some of my practice loops are as much for inspiration as they are about learning a style or practicing drum ideas, or whatever— for example, the Sivad loop or the Attica Blues loop.
Here's another one like that, sampled from Chenrezig, from the Don Cherry album Brown Rice. Billy Higgins is the drummer. Tempo is 169, so you could do a bebop feel in double time to practice yesterday's uptempo bailout drill.
I'm not great at playing superfast tempos. I can sound really good at the magic Roy Haynes tempo (half note = 143, which sounds very cooking to normal people), with diminishing results as we get into the more ridiculous tempos. Above about half note = 165 is where things really get rough. We'll have an honest conversation about how all that works soon. There are other factors besides can you demonstrate a pristine superfast bebop feel by yourself.
What we'll do here is practice what you play when you're playing something really fast, you over-committed in the first minutes of the tune, the fourth tenor player is starting his solo, and you're tired and completely falling apart, and death is coming for you right there on stage. This is about finding a core of solidity when you're in that zone.
Usually when your time feel breaks down, it will go from this:
To something like this:
The first thing to die is the 1. That's bad. You're not really contributing to the groove at that point, you're just making manic upbeats and trying to survive. It's hard to go anywhere productive from there.
When bass players are tired, or don't have the chops to play a tempo, they play just the 1 and 3. This will be the ostinato, our fallback groove for when we're falling apart.
At least for training purposes. Hopefully you'll never be so wasted you can't even make straight quarter notes on the cymbal.
This puts us more in a zone like Ed Blackwell on Lonely Woman, recorded by Old And New Dreams (buy the record). The groove during the solos on that track has the effect of bebop morphing into a kind of African groove that is very grounded. That's a creative choice on his part; he's certainly able to play tempos as fast as any other drummer.
The two major libraries we'll use will be the quarter note unisons pages, and the quarter note linear pages from Syncopation— pp. 6-9. This is one occasion where we will actually play the written bass drum part from Reed as part of the exercise. Just play the written exercises with the ostinato above. Here is how you would play line 3 from page 6 and page 8:
I think it's a good idea to break these up, as well. Play four beats of each line in isolation, starting on each beat of the measure. So you would play beats 1-2-3-4, then 2-3-4-1, then 3-4-1-2, then 4-1-2-3. With however much space in between as you like.
You should also do this method using the quarter note portions of my book, Syncopation in 3/4— played in 4/4, so a four-measure line of music in my book = three measures of 4/4 time.
An obvious next step after this would be to play the drill again with quarter notes on the cymbal, then the complete normal cymbal beat— at a tempo you can do it without just hacking at the cymbal. Then you could do some of my other uptempo drills. I especially recommend looking at my Stone method.
