Getting back into teaching out of a book I haven't used in some time: A Funky Primer, by my former college professor Charles Dowd. I felt it was getting a little dated, and I was putting all my energy into developing a Syncopation-based rock/funk method (which I'll be releasing in book form whenever I can finish it)... plus a student walked off with my copy. I bought it again recently, and, you know, it's actually quite decent for functional timekeeping vocabulary for any straight-8th note music with a backbeat. Much of the stuff you wouldn't necessarily play verbatim in real music, but it teaches you a lot of important moves. So we're using it again.
Here's a little unit I was doing with a student: a few selected patterns from pages 25 and 28, centered around making a double time feel. I extended the exercises a little bit by making some of the bass drum notes optional— play all the patterns with and without the circled bass drum notes. These are from page 25:
These patterns from page 28 are also helpful:
Altogether, with the optional versions, that's 18 patterns; an easy little unit. Students tend to gravitate towards their own personal “generic” medium tempo, and these double time feel patterns seem to be a good way to instantly get them to play much faster than they're accustomed to.
I hate long instructional videos, except when I don't. Usually they go long because they underestimate their viewers' knowledge, and get caught up in explaining WHAT IS A DRUM STICK and a lot of other elementary background stuff. So they waste a lot of your time getting to their actual message, which itself usually ends up being less than Earth-shattering, and you hate yourself (and them) for having wasted 15 minutes watching it. Very rarely they will go long because they contain a lot of information, and, if they are telling you something you already know, it's something you actually need to hear spoken again and again.
In adherence to the stupidly dramatic style where you then say “this is such a video”, I will say this is such a video. The latter kind— the good kind. Tony Cirone is a well-known percussionist, educator, and author internationally, but he's really the center of the percussive universe here in the northwest quadrant of the US. My college professor Charles Dowd studied with him, and many of my peers, and most of my teachers, including drum corps instructors, studied with Dowd, or Cirone himself, or both. One of the big unifying things with all those people is that they've ingrained the idea of percussion as an expressive family of musical instruments. They do not have the deep meatheadedness that is—sorry to say— a feature of much of the drumming world.
This video gives you a little sample of why that is. It's directed at classical percussion students, but the spirit of it can, and should, be applied to every area of drumming:
Here's a nice geekish piece at by E.W. Flack at The Drumslingers, in which he goes in depth on the history and usage of the three basic sticking methods in US drumming and its derivatives-- rudimental, natural, and alternating; and I would add to that something I call pseudo-alternating. I've included some largish snippets of Flack's text, along with a few of my own comments and examples, but definitely go read the entire piece.
Natural
This is the sticking method I learned through drum corps, but it's also very drumset friendly. Basically the lead hand (usually the right) play all notes landing on the 8th note grid, and the left hand plays any e's and a's:
Much of what Flack says below is borne out by my own experience:
The natural sticking method... does not rely on the complex rudimental patterns of military drumming, although a mastery of basic rudimental technique is still important.
The concept behind natural sticking is based on the observation that most people are right handed and therefore the strongest beats which are the “pulse” beats should be played by the strongest hand which is the right hand. All subsequent up-beats are played by the left hand which results in naturally flowing sticking patterns throughout.
In his book, Championship Concepts for Marching Percussion, Thom Hannum wrote that the natural sticking system, “negates any awkward doublings of one hand or the other.” Hannum then prescribes a series of 16th note timing exercises based on duple and triple beat check patterns. To explain their sticking he says, “All stickings are derived by eliminating the stroke of the note which is rested. Then play the remaining values in the sequence of natural sticking.”(1)
Natural sticking is generally easier for most people to learn; it enables less experienced players to more readily produce an even and consistent quality of sound. Natural sticking is an excellent option for marching band drum lines because the simple sticking patterns facilitate the ability to play at faster tempos while presenting a visually uniform style. Drum lines using the natural sticking system can more quickly adapt to changes in musical scores, requiring less rehearsal time.
Time to get out your white-out again. This is something that had been bugging me for many years of working with A Funky Primer, by my old professor, Charles Dowd. Most of the book consists of bass drum and snare drum combinations along with 8th notes on the hihat. A few places, though, there are these oddball patterns where the hihat falls on the e's and a's:
There's nothing wrong with the pattern, I guess, except that it makes no sense in context- there's nothing else like it anywhere in the book, except these few random measures. After a couple decades of just ignoring those patterns, it dawned on me that when you beam the notes this way:
The result is exactly what you would expect for that page of the book. I imagine the copyist was getting in a groove with his work, and got a little cocky about knowing where the beams were supposed to go without double-checking his master copy, and screwed it up.
The classic text on odd meter playing by Zappa/Don Ellis drummer Ralph Humphrey, this book covers swing, funk, and solo patterns in 5/4, 7/4, 5/8, 7/8, and longer odd time signatures. Each meter gets a concise treatment of four or five pages focused on learning its particular terrain. The written text is also minimal but effective- the instruction "repeat each exercise until a casual swing develops" is representative. This is a welcome change from many current books which tend to include way too many exercises, and assume a lot of ignorance (and isolation from real-world sources of information) with overly detailed verbal instructions. It appears to be geared towards college students who are going to tear through it, then run out and complete the process by applying it in performance.
For a partisan (like me) of the modern, interpretive Syncopation-based method of practice (reading a single melody line and orchestrating it for the drums on the fly), the process used in this book is rather old fashioned, in the Chapin mode. This entails learning by fully written-out one measure patterns, eventually adding up to at least a practical vocabulary, if not a lot of understanding. This does work well with the subject matter, though- many of us are back in the stone age (or at least the early days of the Chapin book) when it comes to odd meters, and it's fine to be spoon fed the patterns a little bit while the shape of the meters sinks in. And this book is well-constructed in that at leads you easily into going beyond the written exercises- in a way, it seems like the pinnacle of that approach.
Here are some choice quotes from my old percussion professor at the University of Oregon, Charles Dowd, who died last year. He was a star pupil of Saul Goodman and Tony Cirone back in the day, has written several classic drum and percussion method books, and has taught many, many outstanding percussionists and drummers since the mid-1970's- you can't swing a cat in the pacific northwest without hitting an accomplished musician who came out of his program.
I had a contentious relationship with him, but he was a tremendous influence even so, shaping my concept of musicianship and professionalism before I even knew I wanted to be one- his students, including my older brother, were around me all the time from an early age.
These are as his students remembered him saying them, pulled from his memorial Facebook page:
PLAYING THE INSTRUMENT:
Take the stick. Hit the marimba.
I'm from the Hit the Drum School.
Take your stick in your hand... and hit the drum.
Play Loud!
Don't BANG, unless the composer writes in your part, right above the note, BANG!
