Looking at The New Breed

Let's talk about the book with the funny looking Ludwig drums with the Silver Dot heads on the cover— and all the ugly Paiste ColorSound cymbals, and Simmons SDS-5 hexagonal drum pads. 

Yes, I'm talking about The New Breed, by Gary Chester. It's one of the big hard books the drumming community likes to talk about. While it hasn't been universally adopted— lot's of people, like me, don't use it, have never used it— it has been very influential in developments in drumming since the 90s. It's a coherent grand system for playing the drums created in a time when there weren't a lot of coherent grand systems for that.  

The book became a thing coinciding with Dave Weckl— who studied with Chester— becoming an extremely hot drumming item in the mid 1980s.  

“Every time I'd walk into a lesson, he'd come up with a different system, and I'd feel r___ded. Then I'd go home, practice it, and get it down to where it was cooking. When I'd go back, he'd tell me something else to do with it, and I'd feel r___ded all over again. It was great though; his lessons are such a challenge.”

- Dave Weckl on studying with Chester 

Visit Scott K. Fish's site to read the entire interview. 

After Weckl, there were a series of smaller drumming sensations— e.g. Joel Rosenblatt— who came out of Chester's studio, that cemented this as a thing to do. In more recent years the open handed drumming thing has really taken off, and this is one of the first books that advocated that in a serious way.  

So let's look closely at what's in it. If you don't own it, you can certainly find pirated pdfs online to look at while you read this. But buy it. It's $18, nothing. 

In the Concepts part of the book, pp. 4-7, Chester lays out his doctrine: 

• Learn everything on the drum set both right hand and left hand lead. 
• Use a funny set up, with hihats, ride cymbals, and floor toms on both sides. 
• Each hand stays on “its” side of the drum set. 
• Singing and counting— do it, sing each of the parts while playing. 

Everything that follows is in aid of those first three points, as the best vehicle for creative reading and groove making on the drums. If you agree with those priorities, you can commence working your way through the book in order. If not, you might want to be more selective in how you use it.

There are 39 systems— combinations of repeating rhythms for three limbs— to be played while reading an independent melody part played with the fourth limb. The reading is not unlike what is in Syncopation, first with 8th note based rhythms, then 16th notes. The advanced reading pages are built on repeating two measure phrases.  

The systems mostly follow standard pop timekeeping conventions of backbeats on the snare drum / ride rhythm on a cymbal. All systems have a right hand lead form, and a left hand lead form— 50% of the materials are dedicated to learning to play time “open handed.”

Here is what is generally happening with them: 

• System 1: A warm up, with the hands playing unison 16ths on the hihats. 
• Systems 2-13: Conventional forms of timekeeping, combinations of simple cymbal and left foot rhythms, bass drum plays melody.   
• Systems 14-15 and 18-19: One hand covers the cymbal and snare drum with the bass drum playing the melody, then the other hand playing the melody. 
• Systems 16-17: Hands play alternating 8th notes between a floor tom and cymbal, with the bass drum playing the melody. 
• Systems 20-25: Simple, unusual, coordination problems. 
• Systems 26-29: Advanced, but conventional, timekeeping combinations.
• Systems 30-39: Conventional timekeeping combinations with the left foot independent. 

Summarizing which limbs handle the independent parts— mostly bass drum, a lot of left foot, a little bit with each hand. 

• Systems 1-17 and 22-29: bass drum
• Systems 18-21: a hand on a floor tom
• Systems 30-39: left foot 
  
  

Getting into the advanced systems starting on p. 24: 

• Systems 1-4: bass drum independence vs. particular, unusual linear pattern in the hands. 
• Systems 5-6: bass drum independence vs. a basic fusion cymbal rhythm with backbeats. 
• Systems 7-8: hand independence vs. basic fusion cymbal rhythm plus alternating 8ths in the feet. 
• Systems 9-10: bass drum independence vs. the linear pattern above, played with an alternating sticking. 

That linear pattern, which is used on several systems, is a little strange, I don't understand the logic for for having that be the one thing of its type: 

Things get vastly more complicated with the composite systems starting on p. 38. There you basically extract one measure from all the playing you did in the first part of the book, and replace one of the system parts— playing all the reading pages with that part. 

That's an order of magnitude more difficult than anything done so far, and virtually endless. This is the spot in the book I would like to see much more fully developed, finding a middle state between the simple (but very demanding and time consuming) first part, and the vast, extremely difficult second part. Suggest some more practical rhythms for the new complex part of the ostinato.

Which we kind of get here, with a standard pop or bossa rhythm in the bass drum, that is only slightly more complex than everything in the basic systems: 

 After that the composite system examples are kind of random. Personally, I would want to pick and choose the new part for practicality, and would like to have seen that reflected in the book.  

My brief experience with it: 

After writing most of this post I decided to sit down and actually play some of it, so I went through the first five systems— including the “open handed” ones— with all eight pages of reading, counting quarter notes out loud. I've never worked on learning to play open handed, but it was basically easy after doing the harmonic coordination stuff from Dahlgren & Fine, and my own related system. It became kind of an endurance exercise. As after doing any kind of serious endurance exercise... things move a lot easier when you're done, even things not covered in the exercise. It was cool. 

It had that result for me, I think, because I've been playing for a long time, and have a lot of real playing content under my belt, and a developed musical ear. This is not an ideas book; if you don't have any ideas in your ear, it won't provide them. 

I also ran all eight pages of reading for left hand independence in a songo feel, and I do like the reading pages for that, and for the intended purpose running Chester's systems. They're well constructed to be progressive in difficulty and challenging, but not ridiculous— the ridiculous part is in how they combine with the systems.  

Thoughts: 
The playing theory here is actually rather primitive, dealing with “pure” independence, based on layering unrelated rhythms, rather than interdependence, with the parts connected and based on each other. Certainly that will be learned in some form while learning the systems, but it's not addressed directly in the method itself. 

The singing element seems to be a key part of this method, and you can actually do that with anything you practice— sing quarter notes, then offbeat 8th notes, then each of the parts of the pattern. Certainly that's possible with all the Syncopation systems. 

Making any kind of serious effort with this book would be a big deal. Certainly there will be hidden benefits beyond just learning the resulting patterns as vocabulary, as I observed above. Your concentration will certainly be improved— Chester mentions that, and Dave Weckl in his interview. I've noticed the same thing with other hard materials. It would be a massive journey, and there will be results you don't expect. 

Some perspective: 

I suggest reading Scott K. Fish's 1983 interview with Gary Chester. At that time, as this book was being written, Chester's studio career had ended about ten years earlier, and he had been teaching drums about six years— a very compressed timeline for developing this method. He's a forceful communicator and talks very intensely about his 20+ year studio career, and it's clear that that is his main orientation as a musician and a teacher. He states that his motivation with the book is for players to be able to do the impossible when it's asked of them on a recording date, or other demanding professional situations. 

It's also clear that he wasn't teaching it to all levels* of drummers— his students were highly ambitious, motivated players. He mentions firing students who weren't performing the way he wanted, who he felt would not represent him well as a teacher. 

[* - Update: Or was he? checking out some videos from his former students, a couple of them started with him when they were kids, and actually doing a very simplified form of the method here— the same principles, anyway— applied to Haskell Harr.]

So, I think the book serves a narrower purpose than is often assigned to it today, as it's a popular item with enthusiasts, who are fascinated with ambidexterity, and have fixated on it as a manual for reinventing the drum set. To me it looks like less of a grand theory of drumming, or a system for initially acquiring vocabulary, and more like a very large, brutal— and somewhat arbitrary— conditioning regimen for professionally-bound drummers. 

You don't start by crawling up Everest. The way most drummers develop is, they learn a lot in a few years. I started playing when I was 12, and played my first paying gig when I was 18, and I was a slow starter. You learn a lot very fast, and then spend the next ten years cleaning up after yourself, which I think is what this brutal slog of a book is for. 

Very occasional quote of the day: you call it swing

“You call it swing, but what I’m saying is it’s a rhythmic sophistication that causes a euphoric reaction, and on a folk level that reaction can go anywhere from sensual feelings, to partying, to dancing, to actual meditation… That positive feeling can actually cause healing. 

I sincerely believe that’s one of the main purposes for rhythm, if not for music period, to cause that kind of healing effect.”  

- Billy Hart, Billy Higgins memorial roundtable, by Ted Panken

[h/t to @thenuge at DFO for the link]

Wrong stickings game

I'm hard at work on a new book right now, and the only way I'll finish it is if I write the whole thing at once, so here is an absolute throwaway item to keep you amused in the mean time.

My harmonic coordination series— based on Dahgren & Fine— involves basically doing something normal in a way that makes no sense. Perhaps with the idea that it will set up something different to happen, and make it easier for us to make unplanned moves. 

I thought, for fun, let's try that the most bonehead normal thing there is, a rock beat:

The top letter on the stickings = hihat, the bottom letter = snare drum. Add bass drum however you like. 

It's not really a game, it's just something to screw with for a minute. The way I practice, and play, doing something stupid for no reason generates ideas, it sets up something different to happen. I used to never be able to make it through a page of stuff because I'd spend the whole practice session developing the first couple of things. Try it out, play a couple of these and let them go somewhere. Print it out, try it once, toss it.   

Get the pdf

Practice loop: slow shuffle

Here's a loop that be real useful to a lot of people, sampled from Soulful Brothers, from Kenny Burrell's record Blues - The Common Ground. The drummer is Grady Tate, and he's playing a shuffle in the manner we previously saw with the tune Midnight Special, as played by Tate, and by Donald Bailey, with Jimmy Smith, with the hihat on all the swing &s. 

The form is 12 bar blues, the tempo is about 72 beats a minute. Practice all your swing stuff with this, not just the shuffles. It's supposed to groove that hard no matter what you play. 

Cheap jazz cymbals

During that Washington residency one of the students asked me for a recommendation on an inexpensive jazz cymbal. It's not really a budget category of cymbals, and I didn't have a great answer for him. 

First, for “jazz cymbals”, we're normally looking for lighter weight cymbals, that can act as both a ride and a crash, with some complexity, and a warmer, darker sound. Usually that means Turkish or Turkish-style hand-hammered cymbals.

Buying new is generally not the best value. The cheapest cymbal might be the one you only have to buy once, and everybody thinks whichever latest hot item is going to be that cymbal, and often it is not. They don't work out as well as the buzz surrounding them promised. The Zildjian company, for example, has gotten really good at hyping its new products. So people end up married to cymbals that don't work well for them, just because they spent so much on them. 

Sidebar: Cymbal & Gong is, I believe, an exception to that equation— any truly good cymbal is, when you find one. In selling them, many times I have seen jazz professionals, after playing them— against their natural bargain-seeking nature— enthusiastically buying them new and happily using them for years. To me that's a special situation. I believe they're very special instruments.  

But generally, to get into jazz cymbals for the cheapest initial price tag, you have to shop used.

For students, the first move from lousy student cymbals is to get the cheapest available professional cymbals: dirty old A. Zildjians or Sabian AAs. That's still a good move; those are good, all-purpose cymbals. My very old how to get real cymbals when you're poor post still is mostly true. 60s-80s A. Zildjians and 70s-80s Sabian AAs can be gotten very cheaply. They're not considered “jazz cymbals” now, but they have certainly been used on many jazz gigs and recordings. 

For actual jazz-seeming hand hammered cymbals, in the last decade there have been some tantalizing  options, notably Dream and Agop Xist... each of which quickly got more expensive with the buzz surrounding them. Dreams are highly variable in quality, and it would be easy to get stuck with a pretty crummy sounding cymbal. Xists are better, but are not much cheaper than some real pro cymbals we'll talk about in a moment. They're good if they're a bargain, they're not good if they're more expensive than the cymbals I'll mention next. 

I think students should look for: 1980s American K. Zildjian ride or Sabian HH medium ride. Any random one will likely be a decent, versatile cymbal, that you can use for some years as your taste and ear for cymbals develops. The medium rides will be a safer random purchase than the jazz rides, and will be more versatile cymbals for students. 

That's the easiest move: get the dirtiest, funkiest example you can find of either of those. “Flea bites” on the edges and keyholing are acceptable, cracks and “repairs” are not acceptable.

If you want to shop a little bit, perhaps take a bigger risk, here are some general guidelines:  

The product lines in currently manufactured “hand hammered” type cymbals have expanded enough that we can distinguish between ordinary and top of the line, and recently, boutique— I'll comment on all of them, based on the premise of buying a lifetime cymbal once. Maybe also antique.  
 

Ordinary: Regular lines of the major companies. Zildjian and Sabian will be safest, cheapest, and most plentiful of these.  

K. Zildjian (American) ride, jazz ride; Sabian HH ride, light ride, Traditional series by Agop, Bosphorus, and Mehmet.   

TOTL:  Ambitious/innovative designs trying to be the ultimate in something, with a dedicated elite-seeming marketing angle, stylized appearance. More expensive, with more weird/specialty/exotic cymbals. 

Kerope, Constantinople, various K Custom, various Sabian HHX series, many Agop, Bosphorus and Mehmet series. 

Boutique: Enthusiast artisan individuals, usually one-off designs. It's good that people are doing this, and they should be supported, but purely in terms of value in getting a usable instrument, this is an expensive, rather risky category. These cymbals should really be chosen in person, by someone who knows what they want, and knows how to judge a cymbal.  

Bettis and Funch are perhaps most popular right now.  

Antique: Old cymbals with a lot of caché. Most expensive option, and a big gamble that you will get something you like— many individual cymbals in this category are not good. Or, from a player's perspective, not better than newer, much less expensive options. Can be very expensive, in the weight range we want.   

K. Zildjian, 50s or earlier A. Zildjian, Spizzichino.  

 

Note: Cymbal & Gong probably falls under the TOTL category, though the ones I carry I would categorize as great ordinary cymbals— the designs and sound are traditional. They're very safe to purchase— I select each cymbal I sell, and I only sell cymbals I would want to play. C&G is a very small company, but the cymbals are produced by a professional shop, with established designs and exceptional consistency, so I wouldn't call them boutique.   

There are a number of other smaller Turkish brands that you may be able to find some used bargains with them— lesser known brands will depreciate more, and be cheaper to begin with. Again, traditionally lathed cymbals will be safest. “Sultan”-type designs (with unlathed bell and a wide unlathed band in the riding area) are also reasonably safe.

For a student getting a set, the safest and most economical strategy might be to get one of the 20" K or HH rides above, with an A. Zildjian or Sabian AA 16-18"crash (thin) and 14" hihats (New Beat, medium, regular, light).   

Shopping for jazz cymbals, the ideal range of gram weights would generally be: 

18" - 1325-1425g
20" - 1650-1950g - Note that the recommended 20" K/HH rides will be heavier than that.
22" - 2050-2350g
14" hihats -  less than 1000g top / 1200g bottom

Within those weights, lighter = getting rather splashy,  heavier = trending towards a medium.

Good luck! Please feel free to contact me with any questions. 

Reed tweak: RH lead with LH drags

Reedtweakapalooza continues! I really need to round these up in a book. 

This is yet another thing to do with the straight 8th right hand lead Reed system. Refreshing your memory on that: reading from Syncopation by Ted Reed, pp. 30-45, RH plays the rhythm in the book, LH fills in the spaces in the rhythm to make a full measure of 8th notes. Hit the link above to see an example of that. 

Here we'll play all the single LH notes as doubles, in a 16th note rhythm. Where there are two or more LH notes, play alternating 16ths, starting with two Ls: LLRL, LLRLRL, etc. You could use our other favored sticking, LRRL, LRRLRL, but this way is more consistent with what we're doing with the single notes: all the filler starts with LL. 

Here's how you would play the third line of Exercise One on p. 38 of Syncopation: 

For visual clarity I've omitted the sticking on the repeated RH cymbal hits, and on the repeated LLRs in the last two measures. 

This is really developing into a kind of Grand Exercise, to borrow a term from piano literature. Run one of my sampled loops, and blow through the full list of stuff with the p. 38 (37 in the old edition) exercise. Have fun with it. 

Teaching in Washington

The drive home— the wilds of central Washington.

I was out for a couple of days teaching some kids in the tri-cities area in central Washington state. The people who run the Portland Youth Jazz Orchestra did three days of jazz clinics with the area middle and high schools, and a concert Tuesday night, and brought me in as a part of that. 

From Portland the tri-cities seems like a group of pretty small towns, but the metro area has about 300,000 people. There were a lot of great things happening there. First, there were a lot of kids into playing instruments. There were multiple jazz bands in each of the middle schools and high school. And they were good, doing good tunes, with lots of kids taking solos, improvising. The drummers were good, mostly well ahead of where most of us were at the same age, when I was in school— and I went to schools with strong music programs. The band directors are doing an excellent job— seemingly not overwhelmed by the overwhelming task of getting a lot of teenagers to play jazz. They've created a cohesive scene while not dominating it.  

It was interesting getting a sense of the texture of the students' playing, and relationships with music. They seemed more tune oriented than artist oriented— they had ideas about what tunes to play, but they didn't know some obvious names of players. Which was surprising, since even Art Blakey and Elvin Jones get exploited by the youtube clickerbaiters... suggesting the students are not overly online, which is a very good thing. I didn't detect a lot of concerns with the usual obsessions of online drummers. The drummer in the first high school group and the band director (also a drummer) were aware of me, and of this site. 

Really, everything was great—they're all learning to play, they had good attitudes about music, and about each other, and will have great opportunities to continue their musical growth all the way through school. All of them were taking lessons, several were using Syncopation. A couple were learning to comp by vibe, most had practice materials for working on that. They generally weren't afraid to hit the drums. They'll work out what they need to work out.

One small issue for me, from an educating drummers POV, was that selection of tunes was heavy on shuffles— it was great that they were doing a lot of 12-bar blues, but the shuffles are very limiting for drummers, with that particular technical problem of hitting the backbeat quickly after a soft note. Having a full range of dynamic control with that and having it groove is hard for students at that level. All the drummers but one were attempting to feather the bass drum, which gave them another coordination element to struggle with— whatever the merits of doing it, it doesn't make it easy for young players to put their focus on the primary things driving the time. 

Several of the drummers were generally not helped by their hihat and bass drum technique— lots of heel up playing, staying up on the toes the whole time. The best foot technique of the younger players was from an unassuming kid who didn't play real loud, but did really nail the arrangement he played.  

There was also a Mambo, a Tito Puente tune, with which they generally did a really good job, but again there's that technically complicated groove. The main problem there, for the drummer, was coordinating the feet. I would have preferred that they were learning to play strong time with fewer elements— cymbal and hihat on the jazz tunes, while learning to comp sparingly and accurately with the snare drum and bass drum; hands only on the Latin groove, then adding hihat, and then adding the bass drum sparingly. 

Generally the drummers were too strong when accenting the bass drum, with several prone to hitting more overpowering SD/BD unison accents than you would want. One would really hit them hard at times— which, we consider that to be not in good taste, but to me that's the emotional center of being a drummer, being into the sound of the drums when you play them loud, and liking the feeling of it. He was in the 8th grade, so he has plenty of time to figure out how to do it with some musicality. 

And that's why the situation is great, everyone is getting to play, and everyone seems to be oriented in a good direction, where they'll have time to work through things, without a band director trying to stop them from ever trying to generate some energy. Drums do need to be forceful at times, and you can't learn to do that without messing some things up. 

I tried to impress upon everyone the need to listen, to start getting into players and records— that seemed to be one missing element. Once they start getting excited about that, things will really take off. 

The senior drummer in the first high school band was excellent. Talking to him and asking him to do things in a master class with the drummers, there were the usual gaps you would expect, for that age. You don't expect high school kids to know about every great drummer who ever lived, and they usually will not be able to do every single easy-seeming thing right away. That's normal.   

But then he played the arrangements in a perfectly professional way— he had them memorized, and was able to play without reading. I might have played them differently than him, I don't think I would have played them better from the audience perspective, as an ensemble performance. Excellent taste and dynamics all the way through, really bringing some stuff when it was called for. He had some drummer chops available, but was very judicious in how he used them. Excellent musicianship there, and drummership, if we can make that a thing...

So, congratulations everyone, band directors and students at Libby Middle School and Richland High School (and any other school they might have snuck in on me) on running and participating in an excellent program! 

Shout out to whoever got my latest copy of Syncopation, which I think I left at the middle school. 

Extra special shoutout to the saxophonist who approached me after the jam session to get the correct spelling of McCoy Tyner's name— he'll do well.  

Art Blakey: Jazz Messenger

Just came across this, quite an amazing documentary about Art Blakey, where they talk to Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Wayne Shorter, Benny Golson, Curtis Fuller, many others. I haven't gotten all the way through it yet. I saw him play in Eugene, Oregon, about this time, with this same band. Same heavy Zildjian ride cymbal that we was wailing on. You could see his front bass drum head moving the whole time, it looked like he was playing it pretty strongly. 

Reed tweak: RH lead triplets - five stroke rolls

This is where my thinking is going lately, towards breaking up some Reed practice systems so they're not pure formula. Which I have always done anyway, just not very systematically. We want to make our practice systems non-systematic systematically... skip it.   

This tweak is pretty specific, for the extremely useful right hand lead triplet system, played at medium tempos, putting a five-stroke roll at the end of the longer runs of filler. If you review the basics of that method, the right hand plays the rhythm in the book, and the left hand fills in the triplets, with the right hand helping break up longer multiple notes of filler, to aid in playing it at faster tempos.  

This requires a slightly different sticking system— most of the multiple-note filler will simply alternate, with doubles on the last two notes. With the most common situation, illustrated in reading example 1, the sticking is the same for the original system and for this tweak, LLRL.  

Play the warm ups, analyze the reading examples, and you're ready to run this reading out of Syncopation, pp. 30-45, assuming you could do that in the first place.  

Get the pdf

EZ tom ruff phrases

Here are some more practice phrase ideas for the tom ruffs. This is an underrated item, it should be a lot of fun. Rock out. 

As the stickings on patterns 1 and 2 indicate, when there are two cymbal hits in a row, you can play them with alternating hands, on different cymbals. I've put in a Keith Moon-like thing with both hands in unison on the tom toms, with bass drum, on some of these— you can play those notes also just as solo bass drum.  

Get the pdf

Transcription: Billy Hart - Don Is - 01

I've been listening to this record a lot in the last several months— Enjoy The View, by Bobby Hutcherson, with Billy Hart on drums, plus Joey de Francesco and David Sanborn. The tune is Don Is, and it's a blues, 12 bars long, played twice on the head in, which is what the transcription covers:

This will be useful mostly as a listening guide, so you can check out how Billy Hart handles this rhythmic tune. It's very interesting, I want to write more about it when I understand it. In the mean time we can just listen. See what's going on with those triplet fills. 

Get the pdf

Very occasional quote of the day: electronics

“A kid who doesn't have to whack the drums to me is kind of missing something. He is going to buy a bunch of pads and not even know what it is like to lay into a bass drum. It's like piano and synth. I couldn't imagine getting chops on a synthesizer unless you know how to play piano. There is a direct physical link between a human and the drums that, as far as I'm concerned, you just can't get with the machines. And the beauty of it is not hitting it the same volume every time and not in the same spot. It's the little nuances that makes the difference. 

When you hit a pad, it triggers a pick-up that creates voltage. Maybe it does it faster than a drum head vibrates— and the electronic drum brain is a great alternative for sounds— but you just can't recreate that physical interaction you get with acoustic drums. I don't think the electronic drum brain can translate two small notes played on a drum. It measures it and spits it out exactly, whereas on a drum it was not mean to be exactly the same. 

The microprocessor turns voltage into sensitivity. Wonderful. But it's no the same as hearing a cymbal encompass your whole body, or hearing a bass drum, or if you stand in front of a giant gong and you feel those waves go through your body. Sure, with electric you can feel the PA speakers through the floor, but you don't need that to get it from a gong or drum set. It's just different.” 

- Vinnie Colaiuta, interview in Percussioner International, 1987 

Songo brushup

I have some dates coming up where I need to use a Songo-type groove (the chart says “samba”, but it's really not)— which I don't have to play that often, so I'm brushing up on it a bit, playing through a bunch of stuff: 
 

After learning the three complete grooves at the top of the page, start playing through the other possible combinations of cymbal rhythms, bass drum variations, left hand parts, and linear patterns. My recent rhythm page is good for this as well. 

Use the “subtractive” patterns at the bottom of the page to revoice rhythms from the book Syncopation to fit this style, playing the notes in the book on the snare drum or bass drum, corresponding with those patterns. I've settled on a kind of hybrid system for that— I play the complete bass drum rhythm whether it's sounding in the book rhythm or not. It's a little harder to read, but it works well. 

I'm doing all this with a couple of mp3 loops sampled from Eddie Palmieri, playing a Mozambique rhythm, on the tunes Bamboleate and Azucar Para Te. 

Get the pdf