Page o' coordination: bass drum variation in 6/8

Are you getting to the point that you can work these up in a few days, and then retire them, yet? We've done a big pile of these POCs, but they cover a fairly narrow range of difficulty, and once you've sort of mastered one, the remainder should come quickly. Today's YAASE (Yet Another Afro 6/8) is at the harder end of the spectrum, somewhat, with a bass drum variation which I noticed creeping into my playing during the tour. I wrote this to get a little better command over it, and introduce the possibility of some different things happening with the left hand with it:

Do the tom moves, please. I generally play them a few times with the left hand playing rim clicks on the snare, then do the moves, playing rim clicks on the notes landing on the snare drum. Add accents with the left hand wherever you are able— I just listen to the recording and let them happen naturally.

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Here's the track I've been playing along with:

Afro 6/8 exercise: getting the 3/4 pull

More on this. All I can say is, my readers should be absolutely killing it with their Afro 6/8 in the next 6-12 months. This is a basic counting and coordination exercise I've been using with a couple of my students, for getting the hang of a basic concept of this feel, which is that it exists in 6/8 and 3/4 simultaneously. And it's good for just generally understanding the architecture of the feel, and coordinating it with a basic pulse in each of the limbs.

Repeat each exercise until it feels solid and grooving. Then play all of sections 2 and 3 without stopping: play each line in the order given on the page, repeating each exercise several times. Normally I would play the snare drum part as a rim click, but if you find yourself tearing through the page very quickly, you might try doing our standard tom moves with your left hand.

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Afro 6 basics

Man, it's tougher to get back in the swing of this than you would think. Like anything else, it's a fairly minor daily effort, but you do have to do it! I do have some passable excuses though, if that made any difference...

Today what we've got are some basic exercises, which I've been running with some students, for understanding the Afro 6/8 a little better:

There are four things we're working on here:

1 and 2: Part of what makes this style interesting and fun to play is that it seems to exist in 3/4 and 6/8 simultaneously. So we'll get the hang of counting the bell pattern, and playing it along with a quarter note/dotted-quarter note ostinato in each of those meters.

3: Also we'll begin to get a feel for the accents, first by playing a funk-style pattern, giving it a strong pull towards the 1 of each measure— the 'a-1' should be played strongly on both measures, with the right accenting on the second note of each double. Then, taking the right hand in isolation, we'll make those same accents, plus accents on all of the single notes. After you've learned all of the other exercises, go back and play them again, with these accents in the right hand.

4: Getting into slightly more complex coordination, we'll add the rumba and son clave rhythms, and then clave plus dotted-quarter notes in the feet.

Play all of the exercises many times without stopping, preferably along with a recording (a selection of good tracks for that is coming).

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Kerrigan syncopation exercise in 6/8

I guess there's no getting around it: we're all about the 6/8 these days— there's a whole bunch more of this on deck. This is a Chuck Kerrigan syncopation exercise, from his very useful Syncopated Rhythms for the Contemporary Drummer, originally written in 3/4, but transcribed into 6/8 by me.

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After the break: a full page of things to do with this.

Page o' coordination: 6/8 clave in the right hand

Hey, we haven't had a page o' coordination in awhile. I've been spending a lot of time with the Afro-Cuban stuff lately, via our page of Mozambique, the 6/8 page from last year, and with Ed Uribe's massive book; and I don't know why, but the POC format doesn't seem real necessary for the Latin styles. But here's one: 6/8 Rumba clave in the right hand, with a bombo-style bass drum part. 

The parenthesis on the bass drum note indicate that it is optional— run the exercises with that note, and without it. I don't put left hand accents in any of these “pages o'”, but when I practice them I do add them to varying degrees, based on what feels and sounds good. Also on the the Latin feel pages especially, I'll feel free to make rim shots out of some of them, and to generally vary the sound I'm getting out of the drums.

Don't forget to do the tom moves— they're good not just for helping you get around the drums, but for making you play enough repetitions to really learn the patterns.

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Groove o' the day: Ndugu Leon Chancler afro 12/8

Here's a very fun tune, with Ndugu Leon Chancler playing an unusual form of an Afro 12/8, on the late, great, George Duke's 1977 album Reach For It. The track is called Omi. There's lots of percussion, and Ndugu mostly provides the foundation, and marks the big phrases. He uses a bell pattern I've never heard anywhere else— I'll start calling it Ndugu's pattern unless anyone can remember hearing it actually being used in Afro-Cuban music. He plays this on the intro:

Here's the variation he plays on most of the tune. The bass drum note at the end of measure is played lightly, often not at all:

From some months ago, here's a transcription of another thing from this record, Watch Out, Baby!, with some great large-drumset funk drumming.

Audio after the break:

African bell pattern and its inversions

What we have here is the familiar 12/8 or 6/8 bell pattern (here called “short”; in the US it's commonly called “Afro-Cuban”, or Naningo, or Bembé), run through several common inversions, each starting on a different note of the pattern. Users call this the Bembe wheel (or Bembe Wheels, or the Wheels of Bembe). It's not my original thing, but it has been kicked around the web enough that I'm not sure who to credit for it, other than the Ewe people of Ghana.

UPDATE: The author of this methodology is Gary Harding, a percussionist, scholar, and teacher from Washington state. There is further information on his site, which you can regard as authoritative— if there's any conflict with anything I say about this, go with Gary's info.

You can find it easily in “tab” form, but here it is for people who read music:

The patterns called “long” and especially  “short” will be most familiar. I always thought I was pretty sophisticated, African-influenced cat for occasionally using the long pattern, but as you can see there's quite a bit more to it than that.

Here's an article comparing the inversions of the bell pattern with the melodic modes in European music, which you could say are formed in a similar way. Use with caution— there is no actual connection I am aware of between the two things in practice or in history. I guess the conclusion we are meant to draw is that humans apply similar logic to music across cultures and media. But it wouldn't be a bad practice to think of the inversions as rhythmic modes, each with its own special color. And it may be that that is what is done; I'm a simple jazz drummer, and this concept is as new to me as it is to many of you.

Coming up we'll look at a few ways of developing this on the drum set.

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Afro 6/8 - basic coordination

This is something I've been working with daily for several weeks now- getting the usual jazz coordination/comping stuff together with the Afro-Cuban/Bembe/Naningo bell pattern. It's pretty tricky, and it's a good idea to do it with the preparatory ostinatos before attempting the main pattern.

One thing I did early on was play just one or two measures of an ostinato followed by the same number of measures of just hi-hat, playing the coordination patterns the whole time- this is especially good to do with the quarter note/8th note bell pattern (the first pattern on the third line on the page).

As it says in the notes, once you're comfortable with the given ways of practice, you can take a stab at using the common jazz coordination sources, like Chapin, Syncopation, etc. Ed Soph's Essential Techniques has been really useful for this, as well as Rick Mattingly's Creative Timekeeping, and especially Joel Rothman's Compleat Jazz Drummer, which has a comprehensive section on triplet coordination, written in 2/4.

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