Stick Control in 7 by Ralph Humphrey

A little item from an old issue of Percussioner International magazine, which I just found in my mom's basement— the Steve Smith issue, from November 1987. 

Here Ralph Humphrey shares some paradiddle-based stick control patterns in 7/8:

Humphrey says:

Practice each exercise with the written accents. But remember that when you begin to apply the patterns to the drum set, you might choose to keep the accents intact, or try a linear approach and set the hands off so that you hear the rhythm that each hand creates. This may change your accents and also change the way the rhythm sounds.

The main drum set application he suggests playing the patterns right hand lead style, with the R on the cymbal and the L on the snare drum (and moving to other drums), adding bass drum as follows: 

The choice of  bass drum placement depends on the style you wish to create, and/or helps to support one of the hands. Notice that not all of one hand's pattern is supported with the kick as this would create a heavy or over-active bass drum part. Learn to abbreviate the kick part so that it supports the hands and stands by itself. Experiment! 

Basically, he adds bass drum along with some, but not all of the RH notes. 

Also see my Stick Control in odd meters posts, and Dahlgren & Fine in 5/4, for some other possibilities for adapting those books into odd meters. And see my Stick Control related posts generally, there's a ton of stuff. 

Ralph Humphrey in hospice, RIP Ivan Conti

Not great news in music this week. 

Ralph Humphrey, who had been undergoing cancer treatment, has entered hospice care. He's one of the first drummers I ever knew the name of, from Frank Zappa's album Apostrophé. I was about 7 years old, and my brother had the record. Later on a learned of his book Even In The Odds (he left a comment here on my review of it), and when I was looking for a school in LA, was considering studying with him at Cal State Northridge— ended up at USC. As a San Jose State alumni, he's definitely extended family— many of my teachers and peers also went there. 

You can go to his Facebook page and send him some love.

And Brazilian drummer Ivan Conti has passed away. Best known for playing with the fusion group Azymuth, bringing that beautiful Brazilian spirit to fusion, playing it with a lot more soul than is normally associated with it. I've transcribed a number of his things since I've been doing this site, learning about his playing is very worth it. 
 

Groove o' the day: Blues in Elf

Here's something from what I'm hoping will be the second volume of books of 100 Grooves, this time dealing with odd meters— we'll see if I can track down enough interesting things to merit a whole volume of them.

This is Don Ellis's Blues In Elf, which is a slow blues in 11/8— it's a slow swing feel with the last note of the beat 4 triplet shaved off. The album is Tears of Joy, and the drummer is either Ralph Humphrey or Ron Dunn:

The snare and bass drum parts are repeated a fair amount, but they do vary— the written groove is a starting place. Regardless of the odd meter, the style of comping on this type of slow blues is a little different from the normal jazz thing— rather than interacting with the soloist, it supports the groove, and the built in tension and release of the twelve bar form.

Audio after the break:

Transcription: Ralph Humphrey — Don't Eat The Yellow Snow

Here's a nice introduction to rock in drumming in 7: Ralph Humphrey's part from Don't Eat The Yellow Snow, from Apostrophe by Frank Zappa. I go way back with this song, to 1974 when I was 7 and my brother brought the record home. I think this was the first thing I ever heard that it occurred to me to ask who it was who was playing it.

It's mostly in 7/4, with a few measures of 7/8. The 7/4 is a half-time feel, phrased as 2+2+3 quarter notes, and the 7/8 is a 16th note rock feel, and breaks down to 2+2+3 eighth notes. The feel change on top of the meter change may be a little confusing, but the underlying pulse is consistent between meters. It's tempting to try to explain it, but you can figure it out if you follow along with the recording a few times. Go ahead and count through the rests at the end— get a feel for how the 4/4 contrasts with the 7/4.

Get the pdf

Audio after the break:

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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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.