Harmonic coordination summary

I never did a really good summary for my harmonic coordination system (which I've variously called Harmonic Coordination Whatsis or Harmonic Coordination Improved, etc), let's do that now. I use it a lot in teaching, with all levels of students. There's some very useful, practical, and fundamental stuff hiding in this seemingly very advanced system. 
   

1. WHAT IS THIS? WHAT ARE WE DOING?
The harmonic coordination section from Dahlgren & Fine's Four-Way Coordination is one of the hardest, most pain-in-the-neck things things to practice in drumming literature. That method basically involves playing two different Stick Control type patterns with the hands and feet, at the same time, e.g.:
 

What were seeing there is the hands playing a sticking of LLRR RRLL, while the feet are playing LLLR RRRL. I've complained about that at length elsewhere.  

NOTE: They called it “harmonic” because it's an independence system 

based on unisons. I've continued calling it that just out of respect 

for the source materials, it really doesn't mean anything. 

2. MY WAY
After months of hacking away at that, I figured out how to approach it rationally, graded from very easy to very difficult, while also being more reflective of real life drumming. Essentially, playing accent patterns in different stickings, orchestrated for four limbs on the drum set.    

The quickest way to understand it is to look at Accents & Rebounds by George L. Stone. 

See: accent patterns with different stickings:

The orchestration we'll use is: 

Play the accents on a cymbal, with bass drum in unison.
Play non-accents on the snare drum, with hihat/foot in unison. 

So the first two measures of the Stone exercises above would be played like this: 

...using whichever sticking is indicated on that line.  

To me, using the left foot that way is an advanced option. Playing it in unison with the snare drum doesn't serve any normal drumming purpose; it's just a convenient way of disciplining the left foot. A more productive thing for normal playing would be to play a regular rhythm with the left foot— quarter notes, 8th notes, etc. With younger students I leave it off altogether. 

You could just do my system using Accents & Rebounds and be done with it, but I start people with some simpler accent patterns from the book Syncopation, and some basic sticking patterns, which we'll memorize. 

3. PRACTICE PATTERNS - STICKINGS
We start with some very basic 8th note accent patterns in Syncopation, with the above orchestration (leaving the left foot out, at first), with some very ordinary stickings, for players of all levels:

1. All right hand: RRRR
2. All left hand: LLLL
3. All with both hands in unison: HHHH
4. RH plays all cymbal notes, LH plays all snare notes
5. Alternating starting with the right hand: RLRL
6. Alternating starting with the left hand: LRLR

We ease into more advanced stickings by changing stickings in increments, without stopping: 

1. One measure all R / one measure all L - RRRR RRRR LLLL LLLL
2. Two beats all R / two beats all L - RRRR LLLL 
3. Doubles - RRLL RRLL 

Or:

1. One measure RLRL / one measure LRLR  -  RLRL RLRL LRLR LRLR
2. Two beats RLRL / two beats LRLR  -  RLRL LRLR
3. Doubles, starting with one single  -  RLLR RLLR 

Beyond that you can learn the following stickings, and all of the paradiddle inversions:

RRRL RRRL
LLLR LLLR
RLLL RLLL
LRRR LRRR

RLRR LRLL
RLLR LRRL
RRLR LLRL
RLRL LRLR

If all that isn't enough for you, you can use the remaining stickings from pp. 5-7 of Stick Control. 

4. PRACTICE PATTERNS - ACCENTS
Accent patterns to practice can be found in Syncopation by Ted Reed, pp. 47-63. Or any other book including accented singles in an even rhythm. 

You can also derive more complex accent patterns from the syncopated practice rhythms in Reed— accent the 8th notes to correspond with the practice rhythms:  

Clearly, it's endless. There's no way to do it completely, and no need to. You'll know when you've had enough. At some point it will become more productive to focus on more conventional advanced materials. I strongly recommend doing this system with a playalong track. 

Scroll through the posts under the harmonic coordination label for a lot of other writing about this, including some ways of doing it for specific purposes— funk drill, rock drill, triplets, etc. 

More notes on Dahlgren & Fine

I've continued working on the harmonic portion of Dahlgren & Fine's Four Way Coordination— the basic exercises in 4/4, on pp. 15-18— since it's so bloody difficult, I'm writing about it a lot. Around here, extra difficult things demand extra justification. I think this whole area is best for people who can already play, but who want to clean some stuff up, do some foundation work. Regular students, use your judgment.  

I've been drilling the full measure exercises on those pages, at quarter note = 128 (I use a loop from the John Zorn tune Beeroth)— about half the ridiculous half note = 120 that's written in the book. I want to work it up into ~ quarter note = 160s range. See my November post for the easiest, fastest path to being able to play them.  

I orchestrate the patterns on the drum set this way:  

Either hand + bass drum  =  hit a cymbal
Either hand + hihat  =  hit the snare drum 

Adding that movement makes the exercises harder, but more musically logical... which makes them easier. I'm normally oriented around finding the easiest way to do things; this whole area is about practicing hard, inconvenient ways of doing things. Which frees up our mobility when improvising, and builds a stronger framework the other stuff we play. The hyperactive left foot seems to be setting us up for playing uptempo jazz.   

I'm beginning to look for ways of developing Dahlgren & Fine's system further, beginning with the first two numbered systems from page 15— the simplest patterns on these pages, which have either RH/RF together all the time, or LH/RF together all the time.   

Here's the first measure of the first system written in normal notation: 

First two easy things: play all snare drum notes as flams. This is similar to a rock drill I wrote about in 2019. Play left handed flams when the right hand is on the cymbal.  

And right handed flams when the left hand is on the cymbal:

You could also play all the cymbal notes with both hands, with the snare drum played as written: 

An easy thing to do would be to play a 16h note double with the hands on the last note before alternating to the other hand: 

At slower tempos you could do make that double with the feet as well.  

Or fill in a 16th note anticipating an alternating stroke— with the LH when alternating from R to L, or with the BD when switching from L to R: 

This would get pretty complicated on the paradiddle inversion patterns:
 

Becomes:
 

That way deserves some more examples— there are some other possibilities that I like a lot. Developing that would be easier if you start with the four note patterns— half a measure. 

Another way, which is similar to what Joe Morello does with Stick Control, in his own Master Studies books, you can fill in all the spaces with the opposite hand or foot, to make 16th notes. Again, I fill with the left hand and right foot only: 

Or Morello's way— he doesn't fill between alternating strokes: 

Just some ideas. Obviously it becomes much more complex after the first two systems on p. 15, where you may have either hand playing in unison with either foot within a single pattern. 

The idea with thinking about these variations is not to create more things to practice, but just to be aware of some natural directions the original patterns can go in actual playing. I might mostly practice the book patterns, and momentarily try these out while doing that, to be able to make that direction change; and to see which make sense to practice on their own.

Back to Dahlgren & Fine

Basic unit of Dahlgren & Fine

UPDATE: I've been hitting this all week, covering most of the pages in question every day, tempo around quarter note = 126. It's very interesting— all kinds of unrelated stuff just starts flowing. Practicing all of these illogical disjointed unisons seems to smooth out a lot of hidden structural hang ups keeping that other stuff from flowing, or from coming out easily. It's pretty cool.  

I did something very cruel to a student recently— we did two entire lessons on the harmonic portion of Four-Way Coordination by Marvin Dahlgren & Elliot Fine. Perhaps you've heard of it. The book is famously a real pain in the A— I feel like I've complained pretty copiously about that fact in the last 8-10 years. 

I mostly stopped using the book— my own harmonic method covers the same territory, and is vastly superior; it has a clearer musical purpose, and it can (and should) be adapted for students of all levels. Scroll through these posts to learn more. Or, heck, call me for a lesson. 

But 4WC is a famous book, a lot of people own it, and they want to know how to deal with it, so let me give you my strategy for learning that brutal harmonic section on pp. 15-18. We'll talk about playing single measures repeating— eight note patterns. Doing just the four note patterns seems like a good way to start, but that's not necessarily easier. 

There are no instruments indicated on the staff, just RH, LH, RF, LF. I recommend: with the hands, hit a cymbal on notes that are in unison with the bass drum (right foot, presumably), and hit the snare drum on notes that are in unison with the hihat (left foot). Your hands will have to move between the snare and cymbals. That's a normal orchestration, with normal hand moves you want to be practicing. It's the whole point of doing this. Musical independence has to involve the parts of the actual instrument, used in their normal roles.  
 

The first two numbered systems on p. 15 are straightforward; the top staff has the right hand in unison with the bass drum, the bottom staff has the left hand in unison with the bass drum. Use them as a warm up. Starting on system 3 are the harder combinations, where either hand could be played in unison with either foot, on the cymbals or snare drum. 

First, look for all the measures that have four notes in a row with either the hands or the feet. On page 16, that would be these: 

Job 1: Play all of those on pp. 15-18. Hit cymbal when in unison with the bass drum, hit snare drum when in unison with the hihat played with the foot. 

Then look for patterns with four in row on the hands or feet when you repeat the measure. On p. 16, that includes most of the remaining patterns: 

This vastly simplifies our problem— just play a sticking pattern with the hands or feet, along with four notes played with one opposite limb. Very importantly, this gets us away from the idea of starting everything on the 1— to do it this easy way, start playing the pattern wherever in the measure the four in a row starts.  


Job 2: Learn all the remaining measures with four notes in a row with that hands or the feet. You've now learned 80% of the material on these pages. 

Next, look for the patterns with a RLRL-LRLR in the hands or the feet— that we haven't already played in Job 1 or 2. There are two of those on p. 15: 

This will be more of a challenge. You could start by playing just the RLRL (with the opposite part), and then the LRLR— one time only, or repeating. Then play RLRL-L, and LRLR-R— one time only.
  

Job 3: Learn any remaining patterns including an RLRL-LRLR in the hands or feet. 

Some people may find it easier to do this portion based on the RRLR-LLRL sticking— in that case, look for all instances of that in the hands or feet, that you didn't do in Jobs 1 or 2. 

Once you've done this, you've essentially learned all of the full measure patterns on these pages. 

Observe: 

If you look closely and don't always start reading on the 1, you'll notice that all of the remaining patterns are based on that same RLRL/LRLR pattern— a paradiddle inversion. The highlighted spots below from p. 16 show the RLRL or LRLR in each of those measures— so you'll be playing the exact patterns you already learned, just not starting on the 1:

Note that there will be more than one option— on all of these remaining patterns, both the hands and feet are playing paradiddle inversions, each of which can be played as RLRL-LRLR, starting at different places in the measure. 

Job 4: Learn the few remaining patterns orienting off the RLRL-LRLR in the hands or feet, wherever that begins in the measure. 

The upshot: after the first two easy systems, there are 56 measures total, each played two different ways— hands reversed on the lower staff. A whopping 45 measures have that easy four in a row with the hands or the feet; the remaining 11 have the RLRL/LRLR in the hands or feet, or an inversion of that. Learn that one hard pattern, and learn to start it off the 1, and you've learned the system. 

All of the one measure patterns, anyway. You can do different combinations of the lettered 4-note patterns to make different one measure, 8-note patterns. We've been doing AC and BD. You could also do AB/CD, and AD/BC. Now you have a strategy for doing that. 

Make no mistake, this is a nightmare mission, but at least now we can make some kind of systematic assault. Figure it out, and you'll be one of the elite few— for all the tens of thousands of copies of this book sold— who has ever done anything meaningful at all with this part of this book. 

Three voice / four note patterns

Continuing in the vein of the recent three voice/three note patterns item. Let's call this series “things I have always been against writing that I am now writing.” I've been playing around with an online combination generator, making some Stick Control-type patterns for the drum set, including combinations of limbs. I'm trying to do it in a rational way; it would be easy to produce an insane collection of patterns that would be totally unusable.

This is a practice-able collection of four-note patterns, written for three drum set voices, including single notes and RH-LH and RH-RF unisons. It adheres to my usual rules for what makes something very playable: no more than two SD or BD hits in a row, and no more than three cymbal hits. It's similar to things found in Dahlgren & Fine, and Chaffee, but different.

So: what is this good for, and how do we practice it?

1. There are 120 patterns, so you have to move as quickly as possible. Try to cover all of the patterns in 15-30 minutes.

2. Use to develop an ECM-type texture, or as conditioning for breaking up a normal funk texture. Could also be played with a swing feel, addressing some possible coordination/timing gaps.

3. The patterns are written as 8th notes in 2/4, but you can play them on a four note or three note subdivision, as 16th notes or triplets. Doing them as triplets, it helps to know how the cymbal portion of the pattern lies in 4/4— a separate cheat sheet for that is coming soon...

4. Try these moves:

• Play the written cymbal/snare unisons as snare/tom unisons, or as flams on any drum— I suggest doing them left-handed, meaning the right hand lands first.
• Play cymbal/bass drum unisons on a different cymbal than the plain RH cymbal notes.

Doing those moves makes this very similar to what I do with my harmonic coordination improved system, except with more potential for speed.

5. Add hihat in unison with the left hand only notes, or the right hand only notes, or the bass drum only notes. Or add hihat in any basic rhythm suitable for the style you're playing.

5. Combine patterns from different sections to make linear funk grooves. Play patterns starting with a bass drum first, and patterns starting with a snare drum second. I arranged them on the page to make that fairly easy— sections A and B combine well, and C and D combine well. You can also do A/D and C/B. Section E could come first or second. That creates a vast number of combinations, which... there may be better ways of working on that sort of thing. I'm not a proponent of endless systems. But it's a possibility.

Get the pdf

Harmonic coordination improved - triplets

Here's the triplet-based companion for the harmonic coordination improved warm-up. It's a less miserable and soul-destroying, more musically relatable way of playing exercises of the type found in the harmonic coordination section of Dahlgren & Fine's 4-Way Coordination. A famously painful book. Most of our practice methods are based on finding the easiest, most natural, most economical ways of doing things. This harmonic coordination thing is about practicing inconvenient ways of doing things. We're training our limbs to expect the unexpected. 

This is a rapidly developing body of stuff, and I'm still settling on the best way of presenting it. With triplets, the best way seems to be as follows. This method has two elements: 1) orchestrating a written snare drum pattern on the drum set, 2) playing the resulting drum set pattern using a variety of stickings.  Read the voluminous notes on this method here and here. 

I've been teaching this method using the triplet accent pages from Syncopation— pp. 53-57. There are a lot of patterns, and a lot of stickings to use with them, and if you just take them in order you'll never finish. You could start with patterns 1, 3, 11, 12, 17, 25, 26, 27, 29, 35, 61, 62.

The orchestration works as follows. Using this pattern from the book as an example:

Ignore the written bass drum part— the stems-down part. Play accented notes on the cymbal, with bass drum in unison. Play the unaccented notes on the snare drum, with hihat (played with the foot) in unison, like so:

You can also do this system without playing the hihat:

Play the accent patterns from the book applying the above orchestration, using the following stickings:

RH only
LH only
Four beats all RH / four beats all LH
Two beats all RH / two beats all LH  

RRR LLL 

LLL RRR

RH plays cymbal notes, LH plays snare notes (I call this “natural orchestration”)
LH plays cymbal notes, RH plays snare notes 

Alternating, starting with RH
Alternating starting with LH  

RLL LLL
LRR RRR
RLL LLR
LRR RRL

These one-beat stickings will be a little more challenging:

RLL RLL
LRR LRR
RRL RRL
LLR LLR
RLR RLR
LRL LRL

 This method generates a lot of material to play through, so you have to use your head, and think about which starting patterns you're going to use. Many or most of the patterns from pp. 53-54 of Syncopation are functionally duplicates for the purposes of this method. Rather than worrying about completing the system, you should just try to do this method for a set amount of time, striving for moderate discomfort the entire time. You should be able to get through the exercises, but it should be hard enough that you have to concentrate. If you don't strongly feel like doing something else, maybe you should try some harder patterns. 

Using this Melvin Sparks practice loop will make this rather tedious method a lot more tolerable, and help demonstrate the musical purpose of what we're doing here.

Harmonic coordination improved - preparation

UPDATE: Here are some additional notes on practicing this.

For some time I've been trying to work out a way to practice the very difficult “harmonic” coordination section of Dahlgren & Fine's 4-Way Coordination without feeling driven to murder somebody and trash my office. That's what those half-baked harmonic coordination whatsis posts were all about.

Problem: The materials are hard, and they are presented in a way that is utterly pitiless, unconscionable. Otherwise the book is lovely. But the authors essentially make you play one stick control pattern with your hands while playing a different one with your feet. That's what it is. It's presented according to a mathematical logic, and they didn't try very hard to soften the learning curve, or make it look anything like musical reality. And it's notated on a staff system they made up. It's a giant nightmare.

It took me years of brutally hacking through it to make some sense of it, and devise a method that actually starts easy and gets harder, and that relates to the way the drums are actually played.

The answer is, you have to orchestrate it: play a cymbal in unison with the bass drum, and play the snare drum in unison with the hihat. You move your hands between the cymbals and snare drum, according to which foot they're in unison with. Obviously the parts of the feet are set, since they're on pedals attached to one instrument. Doing this orchestration seemingly makes the system more difficult, but it gives it a raison d'etre, a drummer logic. To me it's harder to play things that make no drumistic sense, because they don't sound like anything, and you can't use your ears to tell if you're doing it right.


So, these exercises: This is a set of warm-ups for a larger system— or, for most people, this could be the entire system. For the real nutjobs we will go on to create an actual Reed-based method. Here are various basic cym+bass / snare+hihat combinations, with which you use some different stickings to play the cymbal and snare.

When playing the cymbals, use the closest cymbal for that hand. There are four sets of stickings to play through. Practice one set at a time, moving onto the next one when you can play them at a reasonable speed, say around half note = 50-60 bpm. The first set is easy; normal stickings used by all drummers, for basic familiarity with the practice patterns. The second set introduces some independent moves. The third and especially fourth sets will take some practice.

The end result is that you will have more flexibility in playing normal stuff. You may find yourself moving around the instrument in new ways; your musical impulses may resolve themselves in in unexpected ways. Mainly this will influence your funk, ECM-type jazz, and Latin playing. Complicated Cuban-style independence will get easier to learn.

 Get the pdf

Postscript: More about the logic of that orchestration system— cym+bass, snare+hihat. Cymbal and bass drum playing a rhythm in unison is a normal part of drumming. So is filling in between those notes with the snare drum. The odd element is the hihat in unison with the snare drum; there's no normal musical effect associated with that— and it'll help you do those funk “barks” with the hihat. There's one. Doing the system this way wasn't my idea; it's Dahlgren and Fine's. I'm just telling you how their thing works in practice. There are creative possibilities with it which you'll discover through playing it.

Harmonic coordination whatsis

Hey, we're kicking around a lot of half-baked stuff on the blog these days, but I... look... if you want to see someone disappearing down the practice materials rabbit hole, visit my friend the saxophonist Dave Valdez. What he's into practicing-wise is totally bananas.

This is an idea in development, related to the “harmonic” coordination pages of Dahlgren & Fine. Those pages were constructed by layering different Stick Control-type patterns between the hands and feet— the hands do one pattern, the feet do another. When you orchestrate them normally on the drum set, what you are doing musically is: various rhythms on the bass drum and cymbal, with various stickings... while filling in on the drums with various stickings, with the hihat in unison. The way the patterns are presented obscures that, but that's what's happening: BD/cym plays a rhythm, SD/hihat fills in, various stickings for everything.

I see the value in it now— it's not “complete independence” as advertised on the cover. I'm never going to play paradiddles with my feet while doing paradiddle inversions with my hands. That's not a thing. I see it more as conditioning for moving around the drums in non-normal ways, and helping you improvise.

The way the book is written makes it harder than it needs to be. I would like to be able to do the same thing following a more musical logic, starting with a single rhythm.

Let's illustrate what I'm talking about with a basic syncopated rhythm in 3:

Play it on the cymbals, with the bass drum in unison, with all of the indicated stickings:

Those are 1) all right hand, 2) all left hand, 3) natural sticking, 4) alternating sticking. You could use any other sticking from Stick Control if you felt the need.

While playing each of those stickings, fill in on the snare drum, with these stickings:

That's 1) all right, 2) all left, 3) alternating, 4) alternating starting with the left. You'll have to work out the combined sticking of the cymbal part + the snare part as you go.

You can also do flams or double stops on the fill notes:

Or play 16th notes— as doubles, or alternating starting with the same hand as the following cymbal note.

If you want to go full Dahlgren & Fine, add the hihat to the filler notes:

That's the fundamental concept. You could do the same thing, hey, with any of the one-line rhythms from Syncopation, using whatever stickings that make sense for the rhythm. The end result is very similar to Dahlgren & Fine, but grounded in normal reading.

We'll see if this turns into a regular method, or if it's just a one-time exercise to help practice Dahlgren & Fine a little easier.

Marvin Dahlgren has died

Someone sent me the following note today:

My friend, Marv Dahlgren, the great percussionist, and drum book author, has passed on to his celestial reward, at 92 years of age.

I visited Marv a few months back in the hospital, and he learned his time was not long.

Besides being the longtime percussionist with the Minnesota Orchestra, and author of the yearly re-printed techincal drum set bible, "4-Way Coordination," he flew Corsairs off carriers for the Navy in WWII, fighters for the National Guard, and taught stunt flying as a sideline throughout his tenure with the Minnesota Orchestra. He also launched Dahlgren's Drum Shop, on 10th Street in Minneapolis, and it was premier shop of its kind, akin to Roy Knapps in Chicago and Frank Ippolito's in New York.

Marv taught percussion at the University of Minnesota in the 60s-80s, and later, at McNally Smith, in St. Paul. Many of Marv's students went on to professional careers in music (hence, the Twin Cities is lousy with really good drummers!).

On the drum and percussion scene, Marv befriended Elvin Jones while authoring "4-Way Coordination." They became friends when Marv took a practice pad set to New York and had Elvin display his mastery with broken triplets on it. Near the back of "4-Way" are some solos directly taken from that experience. Whenever Elvin was in town, Marv and Elvin would get together (Once, in the 70s, at the Longhorn Bar, where Elvin was appearing, he was on a bad turn with his drinking, and refused to play until Marv showed up to tell him things were okay). These two were as far apart in their personal makeup, but loved each other dearly; testimony to both their characters and their love of music.

Marv's percussive passion in jazz was as a vibraphonist. And he played with his own groups in Twin Cities jazz clubs throughout his tenure with the Minnesota Orchestra.

A personal blessing for me is that Marv, later in life married my aunt Joanie, and their marriage was the stuff of romances. 
Marv was as classy as a man gets, yet had no arrogance or guile. He was a percussive obsessive; and once, at a lesson, I asked him how to play a certain figure. "Actually, I do it 16 ways."

"Just show me one, okay Marv?" I responded.

What a mind.

Salut' my friend. We drummers have all benefited from your rotations on this mudball we call Earth.


We all know him as the co-author of 4-Way Coordination, but he wrote a ton of other things that are just about as challenging. I reviewed a few of them here.

UPDATE: Here he speaks about his experiences as a fighter pilot:

Two alternative Dahlgren & Fine routines

YAAAH

As I've mentioned, I'm getting a lot of productive work done with this much-loathed book, 4-Way Coordination, by Marvin Dahlgren & Elliot Fine. Mainly I'm using the worst part, the “harmonic” coordination chapter, for which I have devised a pretty decent funk method. Funk-like. Funk-supporting.

It's pretty straightforward: you play the cymbals on the hand notes that are in unison with the bass drum, and you play the snare and tom toms on the hand notes that are in unison with the hihat. Pretty easy sounding, very not. There are two other things I do, which have a less Himalayan learning curve, and which develop your left foot in a different way.

Let's talk about what this book does with your left foot in the first place. The harmonic chapter is all about playing Stick Control-type sticking patterns with your hands and feet simultaneously. The first block of exercises has the hands and feet doing the same pattern, and then the same pattern with the hands reversed— so if the feet are doing RLRL, the hands are doing LRLR. The rest of the very punishing chapter has the hands and feet doing different sticking patterns.

That's how they came up with the patterns. That's not how you have to understand them to play them. Playing competing sticking patterns with the hands and feet is not a real thing. I think of it more as a three-limb, hands-plus-bass drum system, with the left foot added. As a three-limb thing it's a fairly straightforward system of playing the bass drum and cymbal in a cross rhythm to mixed stickings played with the hands.

[...]

You'll have to take a look at the book and work that out for yourself. But when you're thinking mainly in terms of hands-plus-bass, the left foot is just an added-on thing— played in unison with the snare/tom notes for no good reason, except that it's easier to strengthen it that way. It's easier to tell if you're playing it accurately when you put it in unison with the relatively dry sounds of the drums. It's not a usual musical orchestration thing to be playing the hihat in unison with the drums, and we're not particularly trying to develop that. It does help with coordinating open/closed hihat sounds.

I'm not writing this because I'm endlessly fascinated with bullcrap drumming minutia; one time somebody put this book in front of me as a thing I'm supposed to practice, and I needed to make some sense out of it before beating my brains out on it. This book is everywhere. I've seen a lot of people waste a lot of time with it, and if you go into it with the wrong agenda, you probably will too.


So, these other methods— this is going to be a bit of a let-down, because there's hardly anything to them. With each of these do what I outlined above: hand notes in unison with the bass drum go on the cymbals, other hand notes go on the drums.


1. Drop the left foot altogether. Give yourself a chance to make something relatable out of it before diving into the four way madness. Learn to understand it as a three-limb system. If you want, you can add the left foot in one of the usual repeating rhythms, like quarter notes, or on the 2 and 4, or on the 1 and 3.


2. Play both feet in unison. Left foot playing the same rhythm as the right foot. Unlike the thing above with the hihat in unison with the snare and toms, there is a valid musical reason for this; you'll actually do it as a musical effect, and a lot of open hihat work relies on it. There's also just something foundationally strong about having your feet unisons worked out.


Either of these routines will give you relatively easy entry into this section of the book, so you can actually knock down some patterns, instead of crawling through it like a disabled, probably drunk turtle like I had to. My “EZ harmonic coordination” method will also be helpful preparation for when you want to go whole-hog with it.

Open hihat funk application using Dahlgren & Fine

Wow, suddenly it's the end of the year. In coming days I'll be throwing up as much stuff as I can to fill out any remaining content gaps in the upcoming 2017 Book of the Blog, so stay tuned...

Today we've got another funk application, using the first pages from 4-Way Coordination by Dahlgren & Fine, together with my page of basic cut time funk beats.

First isolate the right hand and left foot part from each four-note pattern in the book, ignoring those patterns that don't include a RH or LF. Playing the right hand on the hihat, make an open sound on the RH note before any LF note. Looking at the first two lines on page 4 of the book, we would do this with the last two beats of measures 1B, 1C, 1D, and 2A-D:

Those patterns would be played, in order (I didn't do 2C and D):

To those patterns we'll add our basic cut time funk beats, with the snare drum on 3 and the bass drum doing a variety of other rhythms. Hihat pattern 1D combined with funk beat 5 would be played:

The same hihat pattern combined with funk beat 4 would be played:

The practice goal will be to combine all of the hihat possibilities from the book— pages 4-6— with all of the funk beats from the other page. You'll probably want to be selective about pages 5 and 6; there are a few duplicate patterns, and you may find that the patterns with two or more left foot notes are not especially practical for everyday use.

There are two ways you can drill this: you can do all of the funk beats with one hihat part at a time, or run all of the hihat parts one funk beat at a time. I suggest starting by running all of the hihat parts with a few very basic funk beats— patterns 1, 2, 3, and 6 from the funk page— or just pattern 1, if you're not getting it quickly.

Another area to explore is to play the bass drum along with the open hihat notes. Pattern 1B would be played:

To that you can add the bass drum on 1 to make a complete groove out of it. You should also add the snare drum on 3— I left that out of these examples.

Adding the bass drum on 1 every two measures makes a more sophisticated groove:

Another example, using hihat pattern 1D, with the bass drum on the open notes, and snare drum on beat 3:

Adding the bass drum on beat 1 every two measures:

Tempo-wise, a good first goal would be to be fluent with this method in the range of half note = 60-96. Have fun!

EZ “harmonic” independence

Fairly EZ. EZ compared to the thing it's based on. This is something that came out of practicing the harmonic independence section of 4-Way Coordination by Dahlgren & Fine. Looking at that book makes you go crosseyed after the 8th or 9th hour, so this is a nice change of gears that should help acquire at least the easier patterns out of that book.

The essence of that part of 4-Way Coordination is to play Stick Control-like sticking patterns with your hands while playing different Stick Control-like patterns with your feet. It's kind of a goofy idea, so just think of the exercises as coordination conditioners, rather than as an actual way of playing.

We could try to create similar patterns just using Stick Control, but it would require way too much mental effort for my taste. It's easier if we use our old friend Syncopation by Ted Reed. If you're far enough along in your studies to be messing with Dahlgren & Fine, it will be easier to use Reed.

We'll use the Syncopation section of Reed to make a pattern for both feet: the right foot plays the written part (ignoring the stems-down part, usual), the left foot fills in the remaining 8th notes. You should start with the one-line exercises, but for the examples we'll use our usual excerpt from Reed.

So this:

Becomes this:

To that we'll add some simple sticking combinations with the hands, in unison with the feet. We'll do the same orchestration on the drums as with my last Dahlgren & Fine post on this subject: hand notes in unison with the bass drum are played on a cymbal, and hand notes in unison with the hihat are played on a drum— snare or tom tom.

Start with running 8th notes played all with the left hand or all with the right hand:

You can then do one full measure R only alternating with one full measure L only— there's no need for me to notate that. Next do two beats with the R and two beats with the L:

And then one beat of each, RRLL, or LLRR:

And then alternating, RLRL or LRLR— you may find this to be surprisingly challenging:

If you get this far, you may be able to try some other stickings:

RRRL and LLLR
RLLL and LRRR

Or maybe a few of the more complicated stickings:

RLRL RRLL and LRLR LLRR
RLRL RLRR LRLR  LRLL
RLRR LRLL (the big test)

Beyond that, you may as well go back to 4-Way Coordination. I don't want anyone having a stroke trying to keep track of this stuff. Doing things that demand focus = good, but let's be reasonable.

When you get really fed up, there's an easy derivative exercise making a funk groove out of it: play the feet as I've described, play 8th notes on the cymbal with the right hand, and play the 3 on the snare with the left. Or, what the hey, you could reverse the hands and do it “open-handed”— you already practiced doing the running 8ths with your left hand. We're working on independence here, so why not?

Now, let me be clear: I've been playing the drums a long time, and I've never felt the need to practice this kind of thing— sticking patterns between the feet. I don't see that as an end in itself. It's more a way of practicing some physical coordination you might not do with any other way. And since what we're doing with the hands and bass drum are fairly normal, we're maybe hoping to gain a little more independence with the left foot generally.