Practice phrase for Chapin

A very small item here, for making your time practicing single measures of independence patterns a little more productive. Try it when practicing Chapin— that Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer— or for any other single-voice independence practice— left hand or bass drum independence along with a repeating cymbal rhythm. Art of Bop Drumming. 

Using this exercise from the book for the example: 

Play it as a two measure phrase, first measure with the independent part on snare drum, second measure with it on bass drum. Practice that some more, switching drums one note earlier. Continue until you've cycled through the whole pattern: 

Alternatively you could do this in single measures— start on the snare drum, put the last note on the bass drum; then the last two notes, three notes, and so on. Then start on the bass drum, end on the snare drum. Basically repeating every single measure in the above example. 

This accomplishes a few things: it tricks you into practicing the thing longer, which... there are only eleven patterns in that part of the book, and they're extremely standard vocabulary, you can take a little time with them. And you learn to play the rhythm melodically in an elementary way. And it gets you away from always switching things on the 1. 

It's an idea to throw into that mix, a way of doing an ordinary thing they may help you use it creatively. 

Chapin exercises in 5

This is what you do during quarantine when it's too hot to practice or doing anything else serious: capture jpegs of a well known drum book, open it up in Paint.net, and cut it up to put it in a new time signature.

We talked about this a few days ago in the Easiest 5/4 post. This is the first part of Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, with the first beat of each pattern pasted onto the end to turn the 4/4 patterns into 5/4. I could have just written this up in Finale, but this is more fun.

Hihat goes on 2 and 4, add a bass drum on 1. After doing this you should get the formula, and be able to work through the rest of ATFTMD in 5 without seeing it printed out. Easy variations you can do to get a little more vocabulary mileage out of this might be:

• On beat 5 just play a quarter note on the cymbal, or on the snare and cymbal with both hands in unison.
• Leave out any snare drum in unison with the bass drum on 1.

I'll write up a summary of some other possible variations soon. I find them to be an important part of the process of learning to play in 5. 

Get the pdf

EZiest swing in 5/4

Teachers' item here. In working with various beginners, younger students, and hobbyists, you have to be flexible and creative in how you show them things. At those stages, differences in how people learn are really amplified— they're slow to get some things, and faster to get others, with no consistency from individual to individual. I don't want them getting hung up if a certain part of the process is not working for them yet, and I don't need them to learn things in a specific order, so I'll try a lot of different things to help them get their foot in the door. Then they can learn the hard thing over time, while still progressing with their actual playing.

This is an easy procedure for teaching a 5/4 swing groove without the student having to read it, or even learn a new pattern. It should be simple for anyone who can play a jazz beat in 4/4, and more natural and direct than just throwing a book at them.

First, play one measure of a jazz feel, with bass drum on the first note, and stop on 1 of the second measure. With new things, I often have them play it one time only, followed by a long, unmetered pause.

Play this one time, counting out loud: 1 2 3 4 1. Swing the 8th notes. 

Do it again, one time, except count 1 2 3 4 5: 

Despite the written time signature, we're effectively in 5/4 now. Play the above thing repeating. At first I may have them put a long pause in between measures— without counting or tapping their foot during the pause: 

They can shorten that pause until they're just playing the repeating pattern in time. Continue counting in 5.

Of course many students won't need to do all that, and some may need more help, which I improvise based on whatever seems to be hanging them up.  

More advanced students will want some independence patterns to go with that, for which you can just go to Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer. Just add an extra beat one to the end of the pattern. So this: 

Through the magic of Photoshop, becomes this:

And this pattern: 

Becomes this: 

Just repeat the first beat. Or don't. You can play the book pattern exactly as written, and simply add a quarter note on the cymbal at the end.

See my series Cracking 5/4 for more introductory materials/concepts for learning to play this time signature. 

Coordination "kernels" - further examples

You may have noticed I've been on rather light posting this last week. Expect that to continue for the next several days; this week I'll be recording my new CD for the Origin label, Little Played Little Bird (the music of Ornette Coleman; stay tuned for info on pre-ordering!), and have been very busy with pre-production stuff. Mainly obsessing over my charts- transcribed off the record and arranged by me- and practicing.

Today at least I have some examples relating to my earlier coordination kernels post. These are taken from Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, plus a couple of generic versions of the Afro-Cuban cascara, which you can read more about in Malabe & Weiner's Afro-Cuban Rhythms for Drumset, among other places:

Refer back to the original post for instruction on how to apply my method. Note that each cascara groove is composed of three "kernels". Learn each one individually, and then put them together as outlined previously; first with open space between each kernel, then gradually flowing from one to the next until they make the desired rhythm of the complete groove.

Get the pdf.

Source tunes for Chapin

Thanks to my man Ed Pierce and the Sep. 1994 issue of Modern Drummer, here (well, after the break) are the source tunes for the long exercises in Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques. As you'll see, a lot of them are pretty obscure, and probably haven't been played much since about Roy Eldridge's heyday in the late 30's-early 40's.

But no matter- playing the tune directly on the drums is fine (and necessary) but for me what's more useful as a player is the next step of seeing how anything at all interacts with any given tune. Playing through, say, the long exercises in Syncopation along with whatever tune I happen to be working on, it's a little weird how together they sound just by accident.  

Tune/exercise list after the break:

Learning to comp with 16th notes is a necessary misery.

Here I'm elaborating on what some comments in a Drummerworld.com discussion on these pages/recorded example from Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer:

I could just be trying to drag everyone else into my particular personal hell, but I think everybody hates the 16th note section in Chapin. I have three different 1986 assignment dates marked in my copy because I basically flat refused to work them up. OK, it's a minor hell.

My operative theory/makeshift dogma at the time went something like: 1) I'm an Elvin man! I don't want to be messing with my nice triplety ride interpretation by introducing that nasty dotted-8th/16th thing, 2) the patterns don't swing, 3) double time is wack. 16th notes suggest double time, and double time is wack!

I don't know what I was about with that last part. I was a little dogmatic at one point about double time being nothing but a CS means of evading moderately uncomfortable tempos. I did eventually learn that 1) Elvin plays a lot of 16th notes, and I did not in fact have a nice triplety ride interpretation to mess up 2) ideas are not swinging or non-swinging, it's how and where you play them, and 3) double time is and is not wack, but it also simply is.