Cracking 5/4: feet ostinatos

In adapting the blog post Cracking 5/4: the basics for the upcoming 2012 Book of the Blog, I noticed an an ugly gap in my materials— for that portion I suggested you get your patterns from Ralph Humphrey's Even in the Odds. So my book will be complete, here are some basic feet ostinatos use with that portion of the method:

The idea is to play these with a few different cymbal patterns, and then do small modifications to the bass drum part— see the original post for details.

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Several ideas in 5/4

Nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but this came up today while I was working on Mevlevia, an ECM-type tune in a moderate 5. I've taken some basic patterns in 5/8, and applied them to a usable range of rhythms in 5/4. The base patterns should be familiar to anyone who has worked through Gary Chaffee's books, or Even in the Odds, or just fooled around with five-note patterns a little bit.

Alternate the singles on the first pattern, or apply whatever sticking you like. Patterns 2-4 can also be played on the drums as a sticking, accenting the right hand: RLRLL, RLRLR, and RLLRL, respectively. Move all of the patterns around the drums, especially the first one.

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Cracking 5/4: more architecture

Beyond the 2/4+3/4 or 3/4+2/4 phrasing we've already discussed, there are a few common constructions you should be familiar with. Just learning the things covered in the first part will take a fair amount of time, and will go a long way towards being fluent in 5/4, so I present these not so much for using directly right now, but more as guidance for future practicing, for making your own variations on your written materials, and for writing your own materials.


6/8+2/4 and 2/4+6/8

Here we interpret the 3/4 part of the measure as 6/8:

Or:

In straight-8th feels you will build your groove out of the 8th note subdivision, with the 6/8 phrasing:

This interpretation will likely come into your swing feel more in the form of emphasizing the & of 2 of the 3/4 part of the standard */4+*/4 type of phrasing. This is example is in 3/4+2/4, but the tied note on the & of 2 gives the suggestion of 6/8+2/4:

Much more after the break:

Cracking 5/4: the basics

It took me a long time to come around to accepting the type of method we're going to use here; for years the Syncopation-based interpretive method-- in which you think more like a horn player, creating a complete drumset part from a single written melodic line-- was the only legitimate one for me. 5/4, though, is so full of traps for improvising players that we need to take a more archaic-seeming "drummerly" approach, at least at first.

The first thing to know about playing in 5/4-- or any other odd meter-- is that each measure breaks down into threes and twos. In this case, 3/4 + 2/4:

Or 2/4 + 3/4:

This gets interesting after the break:

Best books - Even in the Odds by Ralph Humphrey

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.