Working with Musescore

Reporting on a work in progress on Musescore, ever since Finale's parent company MakeMusic informed us their program would self-annihilate along with our current computer hardware, and destroy all of our prior musical output along with it. Actually they'll just render it unreadable, forever.*

* - Actually, after much outcry from outraged users, they may be waffling on that. 

No problem. I've been working with Musescore, a free, open source alternative, this week. I am not psychologically equipped to learn it methodically through the handbook, I have to put my ape-paws on it and start trying to make stuff. I'm figuring it out patchwork-style, with a lot of googling ways to do specific things.  

This first draft thing is a different arrangement of that recent double time thing. That's my thing lately, playing through a crap-ton of related things in one sitting. We could call this Stick Control for easy fast dense stuff, on the drum set.  

So then: Musescore is quite different from Finale; its texture seems more word processor-like, HTML-like. More line (of text) oriented and table oriented— everything has to be placed on a line, and within a frame. You're not so free to just drag things around the page. For laying out the page, everything goes in an interlocking block of space you create for it. The major unit of measure is not points, pixels, centimeters or inches, but staff spaces— the space between lines on the musical staff. 

Setting up my template, I've been in the style settings a lot— tweaking things to match the style and layout of my work in Finale. Like with HTML, and word processors (I'm thinking Libreoffice), Musescore is quite style sheet oriented— it's set up to encourage you to orient that way. Probably a good thing workflow-wise. In Finale it's too easy just to keep re-doing that stuff with every individual document.  

The music itself is entered into the document most efficiently with the keyboard, using the number pad for the rhythm values and the letters for the instrument or pitch. There's a legend at the bottom of the screen to remind you what key stands for what instrument: 

 

This is good: In Finale I spent quite a lot of time changing note heads. In Musescore it's quite easy to set up what you need at the beginning, for the entire document— where it says “edit drumset.” I probably could have done that in Finale, but they weren't as nice about putting that right in front of you. 

  Different thing: in Finale you can place a note and move it to another pitch, change its value, replace it with a rest, or delete its value entirely. In Musescore it seems more linear, and changes are done by overwriting rather than modifying. It seems more left-to-right oriented, although there are probably ways to key around that.  

Note: In fact, there are different modes for entering and modifying notes. I've only been using the default “step time” mode. I think it will be a good idea to get very fluent with that before messing with the other modes. 

It reminds me of the Linux-world vi text editor— both apps have different modes (that part isn't entirely clear to me yet), and both use the keyboard to type the words, as well as to navigate the document. There are a lot of hotkeyed cursor movements in both programs. 

Typing text is different. In Finale there are set types of text that are placed on the page as defined in the document styles, but you can also just put a cursor anywhere on the page and start typing, and drag it around freely afterwards. 

In Musescore most kinds of text are assigned a specific purpose, and have to be placed within a frame. This probably results in a cleaner, more orderly looking page, but if you're used to just putting crap wherever you want, it will feel restrictive. And, as with WYSIWYG HTML editors, I think you defy that at your peril. Things can go very wrong, unpredictable, and weird if you try to force that kind of free placement in this kind of app.  

Basically, so far, so good. in using this app I'll probably have to update a few minor stylistic things. It does seem to encourage economical work habits. I'll attempt something more complex, like a transcription, and report back. 

Daily best music in the world: Art Ensemble of Chicago - 1983

While I figure out how to work Musescore, here's some Art Ensemble of Chicago. My German friends told an interesting story last year about how they got all of this Paiste gear... by some rather ruthless means. Not all musicians are real nice guys. Still, I enjoy the music. 

Very occasional quote of the day: leading and musical direction

People in a band have a tendency to fall into ruts. They hear things only one way. They don't really want to change that much. The guitar player will only play guitar a certain way. It's very hard for that person to hear what I'm hearing.

On some tunes, I might be looking for someone to sound like Eric Gale, and then on another tune, to sound like Van Halen, and then on another piece, to sound like Ritenour.

That's asking a lot of one player. So I try to keep my mouth shut and take what I get from that individual. I try to see if I can't write in such a way as to get the guitar player to think about a certain genre of music to play inside.

- Billy Cobham, Modern Drummer interview by William F. Miller, July, 1986

Finale to self-exterminate

Heads up to Finale users— Finale's publisher, MakeMusic, made this announcement yesterday:  

35 years ago, Coda Music Technologies, now MakeMusic, released the first version of Finale, blah blah blah.

Four decades is a very long time in the software industry blah blah blah.

Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry blah blah blah.

The important part: 

Effective immediately, we are announcing these changes:

• There will be no further updates to Finale, or any of its associated tools (PrintMusic, Notepad, Songwriter)
• It is no longer possible to purchase or upgrade Finale in the MakeMusic eStore
• Finale will continue to work on devices where it is currently installed (barring OS changes)

After one year, beginning August 2025, these changes will go into effect:

• It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale
• Support for Finale v27 or any other version of Finale will no longer be available

Basically, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry, because we're going to annihilate it.

You can't buy Finale any more, and in one year your ownership of Finale is terminated, as far as installing it on a new computer, or reauthorizing it on your current computer is concerned. When your current computer dies, or your current operating system dies, Finale dies, forever.  

They claim to have partnered with Dorico— to the extent that, for an unknown period of time, Dorico is offering Finale users a discount on their product. There is apparently no integration whatsoever to aid you in moving to their platform. To rescue your Finale files from oblivion, you have to use Finale to convert them to xml files, which you can then import it to Dorico, Musescore, or something else. Tick tock, people.

Converting every single thing you've ever written to xml would be a huge task, of course— I have thousands of files to convert— you'll need the Dolet Finale plugin, which has batch processing capability. You can get it through the Finale site, or through other sites. I also had to install Java (32 bit version) to install it. Then you can open you work up in the new program and see how mutilated it was in translation. 

For example, here is a page of an Elvin Jones transcription as I finished it in Finale, and how it looks when I opened the xml file in Musescore, and in Dorico SE 5 (the free version): 

Of course I don't expect the other programs to copy my original formatting exactly, but this gives you an idea of the enormity of the curation problem Finale users now face— you'll have to batch convert everything you did to this. That this is even necessary is the result of a business decision by MakeMusic. 

It would have been kinder if they made Finale open source, or abandonware, with no future updates or support. Perhaps it will be possible to install a pirated version of Finale— if it doesn't require authorizing through Finale. I don't know how that's done, whether pirated versions bypass authorization, or spoof a legal authorization. 

Now, you may be asking, if Finale did this to me after 30-some years in operation, what will stop Dorico from doing the same thing, any time after right now? 

You poor, wonderful, innocent, ridiculous person. Nothing is stopping them from doing that, they can render your work unreadable at the drop of a business decision. Clearly archival preservation of users' work is not a consideration for these businesses.  

This makes Musescore a very attractive alternative. Even if major development of it ends, it can never be wiped out this way. At least you should preserving your work in some kind of archival format as you go— print and/or pdfs, if nothing else. Frigging jpeg exports people. Anything to preserve your work in a finished state so it can be read and played by a human. 

I'll be working with Dorico and Musescore in coming weeks, and will report on my experiences. Good luck! 

EZ 8th note groove with Stick Control

A simple 8th note groove sequence using the book Stick Control, played on the drum set. 

Use Stick Control pp. 5-7, or my page of sticking patterns, which I think is in a better order. This is a good thing to do along with music. 

1. Play the sticking pattern from the book with the right hand playing a cymbal, with the bass drum in unison, and the left hand on the snare drum: 

2. As above, except the right hand plays running 8th notes on the cymbal. So reading from the book, the bass drum plays the Rs, the left hand plays the Ls, and the right hand plays along with everything: 

3. As above, except the right hand plays quarter notes on the cymbal.

UPDATE: Oh, one other thing: cymbal in unison with Ls. L = both hands/SD-cym, R = bass drum: 

Play those in sequence without stopping, switching from one thing to the next every couple of measures, or every measure, and then as quickly as you can, not necessarily changing right on the 1. The end result hopefully keeps the SD/BD pattern mostly intact, with the cymbal rhythm varying in a loose way. You can probably tell that this connects with some other things we've been doing recently. 

Rock materials for drum set are usually limited to here are some one measure beats, here are some fills. Here's how some guys played some songs, which you should copy exactly. This idea is part of a larger project of mine, devising some methods for a more open approach, for students of all levels. It's about playing, not just learning to play “parts.”

Reading a lead sheet

Some notes on a chart I had to play yesterday, on a festival gig with a pianist I've worked with quite a bit, Jasnam Daya Singh. He's Brazilian, and quite a heavy composer. For a one hour concert, he sent me 36 pages of music for I think 9 tunes.  

He was actually being nice, selecting tunes that we could learn with one rehearsal. It's not as bad as it sounds— they're basically normal combo arrangements... with, frequently, composed intros, outros, A1s/B1s, C sections, interludes, a different solo form, recurring vamps. That can add up to some pages. Fortunately we never had to flip from page 9 to page 1, all of the multipage pieces didn't have any backtracking with the roadmap.   

This was one of the friendlier ones. I was reading piano parts, and I've marked this one up up with some of the things I look for, and think about, and want to know when I'm playing something. I marked some of this on my chart in pencil, some of it I just see. 

STYLE: It says bossa at the top, but it's a loose, modern instrumental bossa. You can't just play a repeating Girl From Ipanema beat all the way through. 

METER/TEMPO: Typically Brazilians write sambas and bossas in 2/4 time, which he has done here, with 16th notes as the main subdivision, the cymbal rhythm. Tempo is 58. An American writing the same arrangement in 4/4, with 8th notes as the main subdivision, with a tempo of 116— that's how we're used to thinking of it. I think we played it quite a bit faster than this.   

FORM/ROADMAP: The tune itself is an AB form, 26 bars long— 14+12. That's the melody of the tune, and the solo form. There is also a 10 bar intro, which occurs again at the end as an outro, preceded by a 12 bar coda phrase.

As I've indicated, the intro is played twice, then the main form is repeated a number of times for the head and solos. The chart says DS al coda, but there is no sign marked— he wanted da capo instead. The coda begins at the top of page 2. There is no coda sign indicated on page 1, but at the bottom of the page it says segue to coda on head out, meaning we play through all of page 1 and go directly to page 2.

MEASURE NUMBERS: I've marked in measure numbers every four and eight measures, up to the phrase ending where there are extra measures— some phrases 6 and 10 measures long. I also marked the total number of measures at the beginning of each section— 10, 8+6, 8+4, etc— so I know what I'm in for. 

These ended up being a little misleading, because his phrases don't break down that neatly. On the soloing I'd be listening and playing basically 24+2 bars— the last two measures of the B section were distinctive, and made it easy to set up the top of the form. 

PHRASES: He writes a lot of extended phrases, four or eight bars with an extra measure or two at the end. Sometimes just an extra half measure, or one extra beat. Occasionally he'll do shortened phrases, three measures or seven measures long. 

CHORDS: I look out for home base chords— like the CMaj7 that happens at the beginning of the A section and the intro/outro. I'll also look out for changes in the harmonic rhythm— the number of chord changes per measure— though that wasn't real helpful here. It's helpful to note where there is more than one chord per measure, or where a chord is played for more than one measure. 

In rehearsal I'm also listening for chords that jump out to my ear— like in the rehearsal I noticed the B7(sus 4) in bar 6 of the B section. Those are helpful for staying oriented while not keeping my eyes glued to the page. I played it only once in rehearsal and once on the gig, and didn't get a great feel for that yet. 

THE MELODY: On this tune I could state much of the melody rhythm pretty closely on the drums. I'm also looking for spaces in the melody where it might be appropriate to fill, and set something up— syncopated rhythms after a rest, usually. Above I marked in accents in some spots I would want to catch on the drums— syncopated tied notes. I just see those, I don't mark them on my part unless they're big and unexpected. 

Also see my chart reading pyramid post, and my weird tunes post for more on this type of thing. 

Daily best music in the world: Al a la Roy

An interesting recording here, featuring Al Foster sounding for all the world like Roy Haynes— with the snappy, aggressive snare drum, occasional flamboyant tom tom moves, with a broken/open time feel the whole time. Much of this Foster is playing 3/4 time over 4/4. 

IDEOLOGICAL INTERLUDE: This is the kind of record you find used for $5 on vinyl, $3 on CD. Those are the ones you grab. Buy them and listen to them. There's no excuse for not owning a CD player. It's still a major medium for music industry professionals. People serious about music have a permanent library, they do not leave their access to it to the whim of some high tech vampire squid. 

Groove o' the day: Max In Tunisia

A selection of grooves played by Max Roach on the Miles Davis album At Last!— a live recording made at The Lighthouse in LA in 1953, and released thirty years later. Max here has been playing the tune every night for years, and the way he handles the whole thing is loose and interesting. Comparing how he handles the tune on the different recordings of it would be a good term paper project for somebody. 

First is a mambo-type cowbell groove he plays during the intro. Then on the head he plays a rhumba beat, with a lot of variety to it— I transcribed five measures of it to show that. On the A section the second time through he plays an interesting five note pattern, for which I gave a likely sticking. The last thing is four measures of the rhumba as he plays it on the head out. Snares are off the first time he plays it, and on on the head out. 

That rhumba beat is kind of an underrated item. I think most people how to figure out how to play it on the gig— there's no reason to practice it, there's nothing to practice. People get locked into it as a rather stiff/corny repeating beat, but you can handle it very loosely and have some fun with it, make your own personal thing out of it.

Get the pdf

Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Tumbleweed - 01

Jack Dejohnette playing on Tumbleweed, from Michael Brecker's album Pilgramage— released a few months after his death. This is the type of playing much of what we do here is in service of. 

For a moment it sounded like the tune is in 7, but that's because the bass hits the root on the & of 4, and again on the 1, which is a little unusual. The transcription starts at the beginning of the track, and goes through the first time through the head— it repeats quite a few times. Tempo is 89 bpm. 

There's some random-ish hihat activity, which I usually don't include, except I think it's a co-equal voice with the ride cymbal, almost, as far as constructing the groove is concerned. In the last two measures there's some unusual bass drum activity, partly in unison with the hands, partially in the gaps. Not all of it is real audible, that interaction between the snare drum/tom tom and bass drum is a little buried, the statement there is about the hands.  

Get the pdf

More on that double timing tweak...

Clarifying the method behind that Reed tweak from last week, double timing the very familiar, friendly, happy, easy RH lead Reed system— RH plays book rhythm on a cymbal + bass drum in unison, LH fills in the gaps in the book rhythm on the snare drum. Hopefully you know it well by now. 

The concept is very simple: 

• Play some 8ths as a 16th note double— single 8ths, last 8th in a run with same hand. 
• Play some 8ths as alternating 16ths— single R becomes RL, single L becomes LR. Last 8th, first 8th, or all 8ths. 

We'll use this pattern for the examples: 

Playing single 8ths, or the last in a run of 8ths as a double— LH, RH, both hands: 

You'll never do that before another note on the same hand, so you have to do three in a row. Unless you want to. No reason not to do that too, it's just not what I'm outlining here. 
|
Playing a single 8th note L as two alternating 16ths, LR— last 8th, first 8th, or all 8ths.

Or playing a single 8th note R as two alternating 16ths, RL— last 8th, first 8th, or all 8ths: 

And of course you can do whatever of combinations of those things you want, that you can execute while reading from Syncopation:

There are a couple of different ones on that last page. Obviously, the reading part can get rather complicated, so people will want to build it up one step at a time. The thing itself it easy to play, and play fast. That's the whole point. 

It's a lot of stuff, but it shouldn't require a ridiculous amount of time getting through it. It goes fast, and is easy once you have the reading together. And it's not necessarily even about working it out completely, it's about adding some moves when you're improvising. Playing some fast stuff while thinking that simple underlying system. 

A worthless waste of time, so give it to me free

Vacancy

Something sure to irritate and offend you, I'm afraid: an article written by someone named Joakim Book, Music Has No Economic Value. It's all about how music has no economic value, because Spotify devalued it. 

Book writes: 

The rhythmical vibrations that move into my ear canal as I write this—

...these guys like to reduce music to that— empty data, oxygen, little more than an atmospheric disturbance. How could it have value? 

—depend on a combination of incredible technical and economic features before they can successfully reach my brain. Set aside the two devices under my control that make the entire thing happen on my end (phone plus headphones), equally crucial is the streaming service (Spotify) and the hardware in their business that supply these sounds to me at the click of a button. (Let’s also ignore the background conditions of electricity supply and internet connectivity, and the general wealth and division of labor of my society that allows me to do this rather than eke out a subsistence farming a hostile Earth.) 

Yes, incredible things are being done by the people who make his smart phone, headphones, his very wonderful and crucial streaming service, and a whole lot of other infrastructure. Many, many wonderful valuable people make it possible for him to fill his useless ears with whatever the hell people like him listen to [see below, and prepare for a shock]. 

Without the producers and musicians who created this specific song, I wouldn’t have had anything to listen to and all these other adjacent products and services lose some of their appeal. 

Music: somewhat more appealing than just listening to dead air through headphones, he conceded. 

Below all of this sits an economic relationship between all of us that permits this pleasant and concentration-enhancing consumption to take place. Modern global capitalism truly is astonishing.

Music: a pleasant and concentration-aiding enhancement to your meaningless mechanical existence in service of modern global capitalism. 

There is plenty of economic value going on here, ultimately because I as a consumer value the state of affairs that comes from it enough to hand over other valuable resources to those who provide me with all of this. Hence I purchased the devices that let me do it, and pay the monthly fee to Spotify. In the background, they kick back some money to whoever maintains their servers as well as the artists who made the songs I’m consuming.

Lots of very valuable services being provided there. And my $7 monthly subscription which gives me virtual ownership of all the music in the world— astronomically below cost, because even Spotify itself only turned a profit for the first time this year— also, in a gesture of unfathomable beneficence, goes to pay even the artists who created the content at their own expense. The Spotify is generous.  

But the individual song that currently streams directly into my consciousness (“The Hymn of Nivoria,” by NIVORO) has no economic value- 

-perfectly illustrated at the end of its three minutes and seven seconds: Another song (“Your Gravity,” by Somna) takes its place. 

 

After that, another and another and another until the playlist with all my favorite songs repeats — but even if it didn’t, I could keep going until I exhausted Spotify’s 100-million-plus songs (which would apparently take me some 300 years). I run out of patience, energy, or even life before I run out of songs. Ergo, the marginal song has no economic value for me. If I didn’t listen to this one, I’d listen to another.

It's a novel argument, that the music industry creates more music than I can ever listen to, therefore the product is valueless. Apply this same reasoning to cars, candy bars, or toilet paper to comprehend its staggering inanity.  

It is also very important to this person's ideological project that music be non-specific. Spotify provides an unending river of stuff to go in my undiscriminating head holes, why should I value any individual item?   

If, for whatever reason, “Hymn of Nivoria” had never been created or its creator had legally withheld it from Spotify’s catalog I would merely have consumed another, similar song. No big deal. 

Yes, not all songs are the same, and I do suffer some marginal loss from never having heard Hymn of Nivoria, just as humanity as a whole would be shortchanged had Mozart never been born. But not really: We would have just listened to and admired something else.

Mozart is just a trademark to this guy. I don't know why he bothers conceding to bleeding reality that not all sounds are the same, just to say well, they really are all the same.  

The specious reasoning is: if McDonalds didn't exist I could just go to Jack In The Box. Therefore McDonalds hamburgers should be free. And Jack In The Box. All hamburgers.

If marginal songs don’t have economic value, then their creators (i.e., musicians) are also disposable, a fact that is quickly dawning on the industry as music creation becomes yet another domain for large language models to conquer. Jeremy Engle for The New York Times asks the same thing: “Will AI Replace Pop Stars?” 

And oh my God, what a glorious day that will be, when the all-conquering language models rightfully expel humans from every corner of capitalistic endeavor... except the one this guy clings to, with his little tech propagandistic blog posts. But he left a logical gap here, from music having infinitesimal value (see below) to it having no value, and transferring that from the musical product to the person who made it. 

Strangely, it is also very important that music be made by people, and not business entities— which, in economic terms, it is. Individual humans are almost as devalued in this belief system as music is. Business entities exist and have rights. So music must be made by undeserving, no-rights having people. 

Economically speaking, the pennies* the musicians earn per stream land somewhere between donations and rent-seeking. 

* - Actually Spotify pays between 3-4 tenths of a single penny per stream for tracks exceeding a 1000 stream minimum threshold.   

So, he is saying: Musicians, at best you are a beggar, at worst you are an encroaching exploiter, intervening between your music and its rightful listener with your demands for dirty money. These guys think they get to decide who gets money in this economic system, like they already claimed it.   

I don't know why these psychopathic artist-hating freaks are always Swedish. Maybe they all live in the same apartment in Stockholm and infest each other's brains full time, intellectualizing about why they should get to profit off music for free. Sorry Sweden— I don't imagine there are a lot of them. 500 years ago cats like this would have occupied themselves devising ingenious methods of torture. Today they write this kind of stuff and fantasize about turning their brains into a microchip. 

It all seems disturbing and weird because it is. Humans are repelled by this stuff. It's corporate propaganda servicing one narrow field of high tech industry, and the would-be oligarch human deformities that inhabit it. People like this dream of their money-spewing auto-jerkoff perpetual motion machine— software creating its own music endlessly for other software to listen to, lavishly spewing itself with software currency it invented. But human culture endures in the small way it always has. 

Except it's not that small. There are still way more of us. Their hubris and their cluelessness about what humans want and need will be their end. 

POSTSCRIPT: Spotify, having annihilated the music business as it once was, has decided it can't make enough money giving away all the music for free, and that it therefore does not want to be in the music business any more. Since spending money to develop and promote artists would be an absurdity to them (see above), they will instead give a quarter of a billion dollars to sweating right wing gashead Joe Rogan to shower the planet with addled inflammatory gibberish.  

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Ha, I got self-conscious about my vitriol and toned down some of my language slightly. They don't call them rants for nothing. I'm just enjoying myself; language is a fun instrument for me, and I'll load it the hell up when I find a deserving target, like this particular creep. 

Very occasional quote of the day: better ideas

You know, there are no bad ideas. Only better ones. Let's not say, “That wouldn't work” or, “That's a stupid idea.” If it's a stupid idea, the rule is we don't judge, we just keep moving forward until we find the right answer. Okay?

- Stanley Kubrick, quoted in Full Metal Jacket Diary by Matthew Modine

And stop being against something just because it looks “weird.”

- Boris, a fictional film director modeled after Kubrick. Terry Southern, Blue Movie

Reed tweaks: double timing RH lead

A collection of warmups for adding 16th notes to our good friend the right hand lead Reed system. You can work them up to practice them while reading from Syncopation, or these could be your whole drill. Whatever. 

These are just some things I'm doing, it's not a fully worked out system, not all of these will agree with each other. Some of them are single embellishments, some of them are combinations. You can probably devise some more combinations.

It gets a little complicated practicing out of Reed this way— the underlying melody rhythm can get a little obscured. Build up to the more complex ones by running each individual thing with all of p. 38. If the reading isn't happening, start with pp. 10-11, 30-32, and 34-37. Keep the original plain RH lead system as your point of reference, figure out how each thing is just an embellishment of that. 

Get the pdf

UPDATE: I should have put this on there as well— you'll have to pencil it in on the top two lines. Play each note with the marking as two 16ths. That'll be any snare drum note right before a cymbal note: 

I answer technique questions

A question about technique from Ben in Australia: 

I have been working on my grip which has become prominently German.

I'm finding that it's very comfortable and natural for the slower aspects with grooves, sticking patterns and general playing on the kit.

However I find that as it's a big wrist movement grip.....it gets to a point where there's no increase in speed. I have the control for sure.....but my speed becomes almost stunted. I can't seem to employ my fingers well with the German grip.

I find if I'm doing singles using the German grip and I start speeding up.....my hands morph into more of a french grip which allows me to use my fingers a LOT more.

Is this something that is perhaps natural for me or quite normal or could it be perceived as perhaps the beginnings of a bad habit? 

It might be limiting on speed— though I don't know how fast you're talking. I can play fast enough for all normal professional purposes with it. I could have better technique for very dense, finely controlled playing at very fast jazz tempos— equivalent to 16th notes at quarter note = 165+.  It seems like a lot of people's idea of speed is either way slower than I can play, or way faster— youtuber speed, vanity speed. I don't know where you are with it. 

I don't believe technique is primarily about achieving ultimate speed. It's first about getting a sound, handling normal musical materials, and precise timing. And form for handling technical materials and dynamics. 

I think if your hands move to another grip when doing a particular thing, it's not a big deal. As long as you're doing it well. My hands move around doing different things. I think the only thing that counts is what works when you're playing with people. Technique in the abstract on practice pad doesn't count— people try to do things on the pad they don't remotely know how to deploy musically when they're playing. 

With a controlled German grip, keeping stick heights pretty low (~9" off the drum at the highest, mostly in the 3-5" range) you should be able to do most of what you need to do in music. I can't account for the high sticking thing people use to demonstrate things— 13-36" off the drum— I never have to deploy a lot of chops that loud. I don't think that's a good way to learn technique, playing so high you have to use arm. You don't have to train to use arm, you do have to train to use only/primarily wrist.  

Read these posts for some more thoughts on technique. 

Chaffee linear patterns - first exercises

I've needed this page several times recently— the first basic orienting exercises for the Gary Chaffee linear patterns: RLB / RLBB / RLRLB / RLRLBB / RLRLRLB / RLRLRLBB

Mainly, playing the repeating patterns as 16th notes and triplets over a quarter note pulse. It also helps to run the some of them in their inversions— 4 and 8 note patterns as 16ths, 3 and 6 note patterns as triplets.  

See also my recent page of similar exercises for some quasi-Chaffee sticking patterns. 

Get the pdf

Groove o' the day: Idris Muhammad boogaloo

A light little 60s pop beat by Idris Muhammad— I don't know what to call it, part boogaloo, part bossa nova— from George Benson's album Shape Of Things To Come. The whole record is like this, little 3-5 minute pop covers meant to go over on radio. If somebody turns on a pocket transistor radio on TV or in a movie, it's the kind of music you'd hear. Gilligan's Island, Hawaii 5-0, Thomas Crowne Affair, that type of thing. 

It begins very light, and gains some intensity throughout the arrangement— early on, very flat dynamics between all the parts of the set; more varied later. You'll hear more activity on the bass drum in the last minute or so— he plays it more strongly as well. 

The stuff I've transcribed covers almost 100% of what he actually plays— a couple of variations on the main beat, and he catches a rhythm figure at the end of the form. There is one more figure I didn't write out, you'll hear it. His only fill or embellishment is that little five stroke roll at the end of the measure, which he does quite often later in the track. 

Get the pdf

Very occasional quote of the day: excitement

 

MD: You use a lot of dynamics and have a beautiful touch.

JW: I've worked very hard on that lately: just getting the quality of my sound together. It's not that I don't want to play energetically, but whenever people come to see a drummer they almost expect that, and there's an art to bashing. Some people bash away and it sounds contrived.

There's a sound that a drum and cymbal get that's primal, that's part of the tradition of the instrument, and that can only be achieved by hitting them with a certain force and intensity. Now I know that, if during a set I play two and three sweet ballads, a couple of medium-tempo blues, and maybe a hip Latin thing, and if, during an upswing thing, I cut loose for a minute and bash, the average person will go away remembering that I was bashing. So that's part of the drums, but I don't want to be limited by that.

MD: Well, a drummer is supposed to create excitement.

JW: I do enjoy that, definitely: sweating, burning, and swinging hard. That's what our band is about.

- Jeff Watts, Modern Drummer interview by Chip Stern, September 1985

Daily best music in the world: Ornette Coleman in Berlin - 1971

Newly uploaded video of Ornette Coleman playing Berliner Jazztage in 1971, with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell: 

h/t to Hank Shteamer, uploaded by Bay Area drummer Jay Korber.

Jazz loop, rock loop

Two practice loops I've been enjoying, one jazz, one rock. 

The first is sampled from Everydays, a Stephen Stills song, played by Kenny Burrell on the album Blues - The Common Ground. Tempo is 124:

The other is by Luna, sampled from the song The Alibi. Tempo is 90 BPM: 

Rock with Stick Control!

A little thing I improvised while warming up for a rehearsal.  All my rock stuff is oriented around getting off the hihat, getting both hands moving around the drums. A lot of students get locked into that crossed over hihat playing orientation. 

We're playing Stick Control patterns on the cymbals and snare drum, and adding bass drum rhythms from another source. Circled notes are played on the snare drum, other notes are played on the cymbals— R on a right side cymbal, L on a left side one:

The bass drum rhythm can be gotten from any normal rock book, like Funky Primer, or Joel Rothman's books. I use Syncopation, playing p. 38 top to bottom using each sticking, with the bass drum playing the melody rhythm (except I usually omit the bass drum notes on 2/4). I might also accent the cymbal hits that are in unison with the bass drum. 

I would want a student to pretty experienced and comfortable with ordinary materials before messing with this, like after they can to play Syncopation p. 38 all the way through with a basic rock feel.   

Fully worked out, this could look really overchoreographed and stupid, like bad YouTuber stuff. The point is to do it enough to open things up, to have some freer movement. 

See my rock drill, and beats to fills pages, and my wrong stickings game for more like this. 

Transcription: Jeff Watts - Housed From Edward - 03

Part three of Branford Marsalis's Housed From Edward, from the album Trio Jeepy, with Jeff Watts on drums. Let's do the whole thing. This begins in the middle of Marsalis's solo at 3:21, and ends at the beginning of part 1 of this series, at 5:15.

Includes the very audacious/goofy displaced time feel, starting at bar 10. To me it takes exceptional self confidence, and faith in the other musicians, to try that on a recording session, but he had been doing some heavy rhythm stuff with Wynton Marsalis's band for several years before that, and clearly had it worked out. 

See also the quintuplet lick in bar 24— you can hear how the quintuplet cuts across the groove. It sounds off, but that's the nature of it. You could play that with a Chaffee-type sticking, RLBRL BRLBB. 

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Very occasional quote of the day: interesting

“It may sound like an extremely obvious thing to say, but I think it is worth saying nevertheless that when you are making a film, in addition to any higher purpose you may have in mind, you must be interesting; visually interesting, narratively interesting, interesting from an acting point of view. 

All ideas for creating interest must be held up against the yardstick of the theme of the story, the narrative requirements and the purpose of the scene; but, within that, you must make a work of art interesting. 

I recall a comment recorded in a book called Stanislavski Directs, in which Stanislavski told an actor that he had the right understanding of the character, the right understanding of the text of the play, that what he was doing was completely believable, but that it was still no good because it wasn’t interesting.”

- Stanley Kubrick, interview from Sight And Sound, 1972

As a drummer you could read that and think OK, I need to play interesting then, and start making some bad playing decisions. You have to be careful how you take advice from other art forms.      

As players, the job is to play. It's an immediate thing of making the performance, while hopefully— though it's not hip to talk about it— communicating some creativity and movement of energy. There are some consummate sidemen whose only concern is truly just to show up and do the job, but I think we all would like to be engaging when we play— that may be a better word than interesting for us.   

Interest is more of a consideration when acting as a bandleader, producer, arranger, or composer. There's time to think about it— in selection of players, repertoire, programming an album or set of music, style of production, and in the actual content of an arrangement or original composition. 

It is more hip for musicians to be thinking strictly about performance and craft aspects, and while we don't want to be preoccupied with audience response— what the hell— unless somebody is a more serious artist than Kubrick, it's worth some consideration.