Practice loop in 6: Tekufah

A fun practice loop in 6/4 with a strong suggestion of 12/8. It's really a compound pulse where it's both things at the same time. Hit the time signature labels at the bottom of the post for practice materials to go with this. You also need to have my book Syncopation in 3/4. Any easy thing you want to do with that book would be great to practice with this.

Practice loop in 6/4: Magdalena

Practice loop in 6/4 sampled from Magdalena, from John Zorn's album O'o. Tempo is quarter note = 204, and there is an extra bar of 3/4 on the big figure at the end of the form— you'll hear it.

Use this with any of my materials in 3/4 or 6/4, the “latin in 3” pages o' coordination, and especially the Free Design figure control page, which is based on the same rhythm as the bass line here. You can also use this with my new book Syncopation in 3/4. What a wonderful idea!

Practice loop: Zorn fast 4

Here's a good practice loop for working on the recent EZ uptempo methods. Tempo is 154 bpm, or 308 depending on how you want to count it— which is about as fast as most people will play voluntarily, while playing the fast subdivision. There's no walking bass here, but we're going for a broken or mixed time feel with most of my practice methods, so this will work fine.

Practice loop in 6/4: Lilin

Here's that practice loop for yesterday's Figure Control page in 6/4, sampled from Lilin, played by John Zorn's Masada. The tempo is a little easier than the other recent loop in 6.

You'll also find this useful for working on any harder triplet coordination materials you may be struggling with— I've been using it to walk through the triplet “harmonic” independence portion of Dahlgren & Fine, or the jazz independence portion of vol. 3 of Gary Chaffee's Patterns series. Just make the first three notes of the practice loop the rate of your 8th note triplet. That puts your quarter note at about 65 BPM.

Practice loop: fast 7

At long last, here's that practice loop to go with all the stuff in 7 I've been posting of late. This is sampled from the tune Solitaire, from John Zorn's album O'o, which you should own. Joey Baron is on drums, and has a pretty killing solo on this tune. If you rip an mp3 from the video, using one of those barely-legal web browser extensions, and move it to your mp3 player, the track will loop cleanly— you can play along with this all day, if you want.

Joey Baron master class - part 3: I Forced Myself To Kick My Own Butt

Part 3 of Joey Baron's 1994 New School master class:

HOW DO YOU MAKE THE BAND LISTEN?
Um, drown them out? No, well, you can't make somebody listen. You can try to hint, you can do things like with the dynamics- seriously, you could drown them out- you could lay out, you could do something with the time, like take it into a different feel, you could jump up and down and make funny noises- I've kind of tried all of those and they all work. It just depends on the context, who you're playing with. But you can't make someone else do something, but you can try, and those are ways. If you're playing in a funk groove and it's a constant backbeat going on, and the soloist is going on and on and on and on and on and just you feel like, wait a minute it's like this is turning into like, they should get a rhythm machine or a sequencer, instead of...

Joey Baron master class, part 1 : Paying Your Rent Is High Art

This is part one of a transcript of a master class Joey Baron gave at the New School in 1994. I originally found this in '98 on the rec.music.bluenote news group, and was just able to dig it up again. I've edited it substantially for clarity- the original transcript is by a student who left in all the 'likes' and 'I means', and fragmented sentences. It's long, and editing it is a giant pain, so here is part one:

MUSIC SCHOOL VS. MUSIC WORLD:
It's difficult. Most of my experience is like out in the field... maybe i should give you a little bit of background. I'm 38 years old. I've been playing since i was 9 and travelling, starting on weekends when I was a kid travelling since i was about 10 and a half. So my expertise is kind of like out there in the field, so any questions you have about that kind of stuff- I'll do my best to answer and... to answer your point: it is really hard, to get out of school and out of the academic world. It's a whole other thing, surviving, and paying your rent... if your can pay your rent, that's being a success, forget about Downbeat awards and all that stuff, paying your rent, that's like high art.

It's difficult and everybody has their own way of making things work. I have some really good friends who came into music through a different angle than i did. Most of my experience has been as a player, doing apprenticeships, and as sideman with a lot of different kinds of musicians. I have friends like John Zorn, who's mainly a composer- that's his main thing he's been doing since he was a child. And he had his own way of making music and he just stuck to that and in terms of surviving, he did day jobs, worked at record stores, he helped assist people in the theater, you know, and he kept his overhead low. He didn't live in a big fancy place or anything like that. A lot of people do that, other people do a lot of commercial work, they end up doing club dates or if they're lucky enough to do recording work or jingles. It's as many different people as there are that's as many different stories as there are, as to how people pull it together.