Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Reed tweak: yet another uptempo method

Minor tweak to an ordinary right hand lead Reed system, making an approach to playing jazz at fast tempos. I've probably written something like this before, I can't be bothered to check. This way has some stages so people can tailor it to their current level of development. Hopefully between the different systems I've shared, people will have some tactics for approaching this difficult area better than just brute force “play your bop stuff really, really fast.”

For the examples we'll use this rhythm from Syncopation, p. 34: 


Play a straight 8th right hand lead interpretation— play the rhythm on the cymbal, with bass drum in unison, fill in the spaces with the left hand on the snare drum. Add hihat with the foot on the &s: 



Then you can then double the last of any run of 8th note spaced notes on the cymbal: 




Note that we're making the jazz time as a double time feel, implying this two measure phrase in a fast 4:




I recommend spending of time with just that, at increasing tempos, and not going straight for the following denser options. But from there you could double any single left hand notes (which is all of them, in this example):



From there you could fill in any remaining 16th notes— notice that the hands are doing a paradiddle diddle sticking here: 


Here we're playing the RH doubles on the bass drum as well, and taking away the single notes: 



Or you could take way the bass drum altogether. Try some different things. 

I don't know how useful it would be to play the full page exercises this way. Not all the one line rhythms in Reed will work equally well as actual playing texture— consider them more as calisthenic drills than literal playing vocabulary. Actual tempos for the above could be 120-200, making implied tempos of 240-400 bpm. 

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