Stone flam beats as independence patterns

I like doing this once in awhile: converting familiar materials into another format. Rhythm patterns (plus filler) can be converted to sticking patterns, accent patterns can be converted to rhythm patterns, sticking patterns can be converted to accent patterns... and vice versa. Any of them can be put into another rhythm or meter. We infer a lot of what we do on the drum set from those types of materials.  

Here I've written the eighteen basic flam beat patterns from Stick Control (p. 16) as coordination patterns for two voices, with the flams written as unisons. 

I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of use for this, but I often think about it when I'm practicing those pages. Like, what rhythm is each hand actually playing? It's good to know. For me it does illustrate how inane the Stone patterns are as real drum set vocabulary. It's rather dense nonsense, weighted on the 1. Good for developing an Ed Blackwell style of soloing on the tom toms, though. 

One possible place to take this, to make a Garibaldi-esque funk groove: eliminate the snare hit on every 1, or play that note on the bass drum. Accent the left hand on every beat 2, ghost the other LH notes. Add bass drum to any remaining RH-only notes you wish, or in gaps in the rhythm— es of the beat on patterns 1-7. You may find some connection with this and the funk stick control patterns I wrote back in November. 

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Page o' coordination: jazz / RLRR

Working on this Elvin project the last couple of days, I noticed that, similar to Max Roach on another recording, he plays the snare drum in the gap in the cymbal rhythm a lot, for a sticking of: RLRR RLRR. It's almost like a foundation pattern, a home base. This a page using that pattern, adding some basic things to it.  

I already wrote this page, more or less, last year, but this version is easier. I'll use this with a few of my novice jazz students. I really like teaching the same basic thing several different ways. Like if we just teach jazz comping rhythms with Chapin, people start thinking jazz = one-measure left hand independence patterns vs. a static cymbal rhythm. If we only do Syncopation, maybe they won't have all finer points of the coordination worked out. You never know what idea is going to click for what person, so they really understand what they're doing, and are able to use it creatively. 

Swing the 8th notes. Treat the complete exercise patterns as extensions of the base RLRR pattern— they're places to go from the base pattern. Add the hihat on beats 2 and 4, or— and this is another thing I notice Elvin doing a lot— on the & of 1 / & of 3, in unison with the snare drum. Actually Elvin does it most often in unison with the bass drum, but that'll have to wait for another page of stuff.

Also see my other pages of sticking patterns for jazz. Also check out a post from a long time ago, The Kenny Note, in which I noticed the Kenny Clarke sure does play that comping rhythm a lot.  

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From the zone: ECM feel

Here's something sent in by Ed Stalling of Missoula, Montana. He mentioned being inspired by my ECM feel post from 2012— which definitely needs to be revisited and some links updated— but he's got his own thing happening here. 

I like the idea of notating flam rudiments for two voices this way. Normally on drumset I would write them with two complete rhythms on one set of stems. Here you can ignore some of the notes, and just play the basic sticking pattern, and add the flams to make the more challenging overlapping independent rhythms. It really suggests some interesting possibilities for ways of practicing Stick Control. You could do that with the flam pages from Stone, but I don't find it real inspiring with the flams/unisons in the same place every time.  

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I encourage you to send in your own writings for inclusion in a “FROM THE ZONE” post— seriously, anything scraped off the floor of your practice room, where you wrote something out to figure it out. I don't care how bad it looks. I want it to look bad. Take a picture with your phone and send it to my email link you see in the sidebar. 

Stick Control patterns for a certain type of funk

 A thing we do here is to rewrite/re-organize existing materials to make them better for practicing certain things. I hate hunting around the page while I practice, flipping pages, dodging things that are no good for what I'm practicing. 

Playing with a loop from a Meters song, I played some Stick Control combinations on the drumset to make a funk texture— I combined all the four-note patterns starting with an R with all of the four note patterns starting with an L. So beat 1 was an R, beat 3 was an L.  

You could just memorize the first thirteen patterns from Stone and figure out the combinations in your head while you play, as I did— or I can write them out so I have something to post on the blog, and maybe a few people will actually do it. Some of these combinations are already in the book, others are not. There are two pages, the first is most useful. 

Play this in 2/2, with the Rs as cymbal + bass drum, Ls as snare drum— with the appropriate hand. I put an accent on the cut time beat 2; or beat 3 if you're counting in 4/4... look, do this: 

I played quarter notes on the hihat with my foot, and played the unaccented snare drum notes pretty strongly— I wasn't ghosting them. It's an ordinary orchestration we do with Syncopation all the time, but it's hard to do this exact thing without using Stick Control-type patterns. 

It's similar to what Zigaboo Modeliste does at times, de-emphasizing the cymbal rhythm. And it's a lesson in a certain un-intricate concept of funk. I like unintricacy in funk. We're playing an 8th note grid, but it's a grid of interlocking parts, which creates a strong groove. To me, groove-wise, plain 8th notes played on a single sound is a weak structure; interlocking parts is a strong structure. You may not play this way all the time, but it sets you up to move some different directions— especially if you're used to playing funk with a repeating cymbal rhythm, or a linear cymbal rhythm. 

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Jazz fundamentals: more stick control for jazz

Another jazz fundamentals item, that pairs nicely with Monday's thing. These are some stick control patterns designed to be played on the drumset, for a specific jazz vocabulary lesson. That's a lot of what we do here. I wrote something like this back in March, with a slightly different purpose— a nice thing about having software like Finale is that it's easy to focus our materials.

This page is meant to help with adding the left hand to some basic cymbal rhythms, and also to help get the timing of some common figures— “additive rhythm” style. We'll be seeing that term again in coming days.

Swing the 8th notes. Play the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on the snare drum. Add bass drum to some or all of the RH notes. Add hihat on beats 2 and 4.

Some of the patterns have the option of playing the left hand on beat 1— those are to get the timing of a cymbal accent on the & of 4. 

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Stick control exercises, mixed rhythm in 2/4

A page I'm using with some of my students, to learn to fill, and develop basic facility on the drum set. We've been doing a lot with parts of my harmonic coordination method— which is proving to be a lot more of a universal thing than a mere advanced coordination system. You could do these on snare drum as in Stone, but I think that would be a little dull. They're written to be played on drum set, en masse.

Play the exercises a few times on the snare drum, then move the accent(s) to a cymbal, with the bass drum in unison, then improvise moving the non-accented notes around the drums. Speed is not important; timing, sound, and movement around the drums is.

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Three voice / four note patterns

Continuing in the vein of the recent three voice/three note patterns item. Let's call this series “things I have always been against writing that I am now writing.” I've been playing around with an online combination generator, making some Stick Control-type patterns for the drum set, including combinations of limbs. I'm trying to do it in a rational way; it would be easy to produce an insane collection of patterns that would be totally unusable.

This is a practice-able collection of four-note patterns, written for three drum set voices, including single notes and RH-LH and RH-RF unisons. It adheres to my usual rules for what makes something very playable: no more than two SD or BD hits in a row, and no more than three cymbal hits. It's similar to things found in Dahlgren & Fine, and Chaffee, but different.

So: what is this good for, and how do we practice it?

1. There are 120 patterns, so you have to move as quickly as possible. Try to cover all of the patterns in 15-30 minutes.

2. Use to develop an ECM-type texture, or as conditioning for breaking up a normal funk texture. Could also be played with a swing feel, addressing some possible coordination/timing gaps.

3. The patterns are written as 8th notes in 2/4, but you can play them on a four note or three note subdivision, as 16th notes or triplets. Doing them as triplets, it helps to know how the cymbal portion of the pattern lies in 4/4— a separate cheat sheet for that is coming soon...

4. Try these moves:

• Play the written cymbal/snare unisons as snare/tom unisons, or as flams on any drum— I suggest doing them left-handed, meaning the right hand lands first.
• Play cymbal/bass drum unisons on a different cymbal than the plain RH cymbal notes.

Doing those moves makes this very similar to what I do with my harmonic coordination improved system, except with more potential for speed.

5. Add hihat in unison with the left hand only notes, or the right hand only notes, or the bass drum only notes. Or add hihat in any basic rhythm suitable for the style you're playing.

5. Combine patterns from different sections to make linear funk grooves. Play patterns starting with a bass drum first, and patterns starting with a snare drum second. I arranged them on the page to make that fairly easy— sections A and B combine well, and C and D combine well. You can also do A/D and C/B. Section E could come first or second. That creates a vast number of combinations, which... there may be better ways of working on that sort of thing. I'm not a proponent of endless systems. But it's a possibility.

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Three voice / three note patterns

The sort of thing you write when you're under quarantine— a library item strictly for maniacs, in the same ballpark of extremity/uselessness as Gary Chaffee's jazz patterns, from Patterns vol. 3. In fact that's exactly what I'm working on right now, and what led to this.

I've written some three-note sticking patterns for three voices: R, L, B. Then I wrote them out for drumset, with R on cymbal, L on snare drum, and B meaning either Both hands or Bass drum. Then I did some additional patterns including right hand/bass drum unisons; and some more patterns including both hands unisons. 

Like Chafee's thing, these are ordered by a mathematical logic, not the way a rational person would use them. Very useful patterns are mixed in with not very useful ones, and normal vocabulary items are mixed in with not at all normal ones. It limits how fast you can do the complete system, and doesn't lead you directly to normally-useful material. So the only people who should be using this are hardcore practicers, or lifers like me who can already play, but who want to fill in some gaps. It should be helpful for developing a triplet-feel version of a ECM feel, or a ballad in the manner of Tony Williams playing Fall, maybe. 

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Four on the floor: Stone meets Ghana

Here's something very rare, an idea to base your whole life on: Stone-type patterns based on Ghanaian bell patterns. This is from Jon McCaslin over at Four on the Floor, given to him by the percussionist Russell Hartenberger. Just go over there and get them, and print them, and keep them in your notebook forever.

Stick control patterns for jazz

Because some novice jazz students get hung up on the idea of left hand “independence”, here is a little set of exercises for helping coordination between the hands when playing jazz time. We're using some sticking patterns to make some common cymbal and comping rhythms.

You can play the patterns in 4, or in 3, by just playing up to the dashed bar line. Play the Rs on the cymbal, Ls on the snare drum:

B means both hands in unison:

Focus on the rhythm— which is running swing 8th notes— and the sticking, and don't make the leap to “I'm playing this rhythm on the cymbal, and this rhythm on the snare drum.” Play with just the hands at first, then add the hihat:

You can add bass drum on 1 when you're playing in 3.

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive method— it's more a remedial method for people having trouble getting the coordination, and/or with making a solid rhythm between all the parts. After working through this page, continue with normal jazz materials.

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Rubadub with Stone

Reversing a years-long boycott, I've been using the book Stick Control quite a bit for drum set applications lately. I guess it's unavoidable that sometimes in playing the drums, we think in terms of stickings. This is an easy drill for doing a rubadub-type move with the exercises on pp. 5-7.

In its basic form, rubadub, as described by Chris Smith, is a three-8th note pattern played in */4 meters. The sticking is LRR, with the L on the snare drum, the first R on a cymbal + bass drum, and the second right on a tom tom:

The sticking alone is:

After learning to play the basic lick in 4/4, you then improvise with it, mix it up, and move it around the drums in different ways. If you can't do that by just winging it, this Stone-based method will help in opening up some possibilities.

It's quite simple. Start by playing the patterns with this basic drumset orchestration— I've started calling this “natural” orchestration: 

R = right hand on cymbal + bass drum

L = left hand on snare drum

Play with a swing feel. 

Then, wherever there are two Rs in a row, play the first R on the cymbal/ BD, second R on a tom tom:

Do that with patterns 3-4, 5-8, 14-18, 24-26, 33, 35-36, 41, 44-46, 65, and 68. 

You could do the same move where there are more than two Rs in a row. Just hit the first one on the cym/BD, and the rest on the toms:

I suppose you could default playing the Rs on the toms, only moving to the cymbal when there's more than one R. So pattern 5, a paradiddle sticking, would be played:

Here's that same sticking with my regular orchestration:

With anything to do with rubadub I would be thinking about moving both hands around the drums, and playing ideas as part of a regular jazz texture. Since it is used as a way of playing setups and kicks, and filling in between them, I would be aware of the rhythm of the cymbal/bass drum notes— those are the kicks that the rest of the pattern is setting up. A subject for another post, probably.  

Harmonic coordination improved - preparation

UPDATE: Here are some additional notes on practicing this.

For some time I've been trying to work out a way to practice the very difficult “harmonic” coordination section of Dahlgren & Fine's 4-Way Coordination without feeling driven to murder somebody and trash my office. That's what those half-baked harmonic coordination whatsis posts were all about.

Problem: The materials are hard, and they are presented in a way that is utterly pitiless, unconscionable. Otherwise the book is lovely. But the authors essentially make you play one stick control pattern with your hands while playing a different one with your feet. That's what it is. It's presented according to a mathematical logic, and they didn't try very hard to soften the learning curve, or make it look anything like musical reality. And it's notated on a staff system they made up. It's a giant nightmare.

It took me years of brutally hacking through it to make some sense of it, and devise a method that actually starts easy and gets harder, and that relates to the way the drums are actually played.

The answer is, you have to orchestrate it: play a cymbal in unison with the bass drum, and play the snare drum in unison with the hihat. You move your hands between the cymbals and snare drum, according to which foot they're in unison with. Obviously the parts of the feet are set, since they're on pedals attached to one instrument. Doing this orchestration seemingly makes the system more difficult, but it gives it a raison d'etre, a drummer logic. To me it's harder to play things that make no drumistic sense, because they don't sound like anything, and you can't use your ears to tell if you're doing it right.


So, these exercises: This is a set of warm-ups for a larger system— or, for most people, this could be the entire system. For the real nutjobs we will go on to create an actual Reed-based method. Here are various basic cym+bass / snare+hihat combinations, with which you use some different stickings to play the cymbal and snare.

When playing the cymbals, use the closest cymbal for that hand. There are four sets of stickings to play through. Practice one set at a time, moving onto the next one when you can play them at a reasonable speed, say around half note = 50-60 bpm. The first set is easy; normal stickings used by all drummers, for basic familiarity with the practice patterns. The second set introduces some independent moves. The third and especially fourth sets will take some practice.

The end result is that you will have more flexibility in playing normal stuff. You may find yourself moving around the instrument in new ways; your musical impulses may resolve themselves in in unexpected ways. Mainly this will influence your funk, ECM-type jazz, and Latin playing. Complicated Cuban-style independence will get easier to learn.

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Postscript: More about the logic of that orchestration system— cym+bass, snare+hihat. Cymbal and bass drum playing a rhythm in unison is a normal part of drumming. So is filling in between those notes with the snare drum. The odd element is the hihat in unison with the snare drum; there's no normal musical effect associated with that— and it'll help you do those funk “barks” with the hihat. There's one. Doing the system this way wasn't my idea; it's Dahlgren and Fine's. I'm just telling you how their thing works in practice. There are creative possibilities with it which you'll discover through playing it.

Paradiddle stick control patterns in 3

I don't know what's going on, but I'm using a lot of Stick Control-type stuff in practicing lately. Sometimes you just want things written as a sticking. Here I've written out some paradiddle variations in 3 that I was improvising on the drumset:

I don't believe you need to spend a lot of time in life playing 8th note sticking patterns on the practice pad at an even volume. You got all you needed of that in the first few years of playing the regular stuff in Stick Control— you don't need to do that with these pages. Add accents, or do them on the drums like this:

1. R = RH-cym + BD / L = left on snare and/or toms
2. R = BD / L = both hands in unison on drums or SD+cym
3. R = BD / L = LH on snare drum - ADD RH on cym in stock rhythm of your choice

These are fun to play in 6/4 with my Lilin or Free Design practice loops. They can also be played as 16th notes in 3/4.

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Stick Control - CSD! version

UPDATE: Download link working. You'd think I'd have that part of it down.

Everybody and his literal dog practices the first page of the book Stick Control, as do I— at least I teach it, and use it on drumset for certain things. I've said before the reasons I'm not that in favor of it, but so many people use it, and understand drumming this way, I'll work with it. It has its uses. The following item takes the most useful 36 exercises of the 72 in the book, and puts them in the order in which I teach them. I think these are the patterns that are either good for your hands in a specific way, or that apply well to the drum set.

If you're just getting your technique together, do these on the snare drum or practice pad, two to four repetitions, or up to one minute of each exercise. I think you should do them at an easy tempo and a slightly challenging tempo. The first, easiest drumset application is to play your left hand on the snare drum, and your right hand on any cymbal, with the bass drum in unison. See my Funk Control series for clues on other ways of doing this, or contact me (see the sidebar) for a Skype lesson about it.

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(h/t to Andrew at The Melodic Drummer, who did this before me)

Stone on drumset: sixtuplet exercise

We're doing quite a bit with the book Stick Control on the drumset these days. There are a lot of things I don't like about the book— mainly that it's based on abstract sequences of Rs and Ls over a single rhythm, and there's no musical reference for that. But real players do use it, and it's such a familiar book that it's good to try to connect it with other things we do. And I think playing it on the drumset also helps make it more valuable as a snare drum book— a drumset orchestration gives those Rs and Ls some actual musical meaning.

This is a little thing you can do with the triplet portion of the book— exercises 1-12 on page 8, and all of page 9. We're playing in cut time, with two beats per measure.

On the 8th notes portion we're using the same orchestration as on my recent Stone drumset exercises: play the RH on any cymbal, with bass drum in unison, play the LH on any drum. On the triplet portion we'll plug in a standard triplet lick, RLB. So ex. 1 from p.8 of Stick Control:

Would be played:

For the LH-leading exercises you could do the same triplet lick reversed— LRB— but I like to do LBR. So for exercise 2 from Stone:

 I play:

So any time the triplet portion begins with the right I play RLB, and anytime it begins with the left I play LBR. So exercise 5:

Would be played:

Of course, you can plug in anything you want on the triplet portion. For example:

Whatever you like. Keep your hands moving around the drums and cymbals. Get this thoroughly together in the half note = 60-90 range before worrying about getting it faster.  

Stick Control drumset exercise - RLRR-LRLL

Part 3 of this series, where the need to write out the exercises becomes perhaps more apparent. We're playing a basic drumset orchestration of exercises from the first page of Stick Control by George L. Stone, while doing a variety of stock left hand moves around the drums. Usually when doing those moves along with an exercise I'll keep any doubles on the same drum, rather than moving on every single note; here we're doing it both ways— as you'll see, there are some very hip melodic things that happen with the toms when you split the doubles between drums.

There are 33 drumset exercises total here, so if you do them for 30 seconds each without stopping, it'll take you a little over 16 minutes to do the entire drill. I usually do them 4 or 8 times each. If you can do these along with my Betty Davis practice loop (playing in cut time, so the 8th notes are at the loop's 16th note speed), that's a pretty good first state for this exercise.

Ambitious students looking for ways to take this farther can do the same thing with patterns 6-8 in Stick Control— the paradiddle inversions, RLLR-LRRL, RRLR-LLRL, and RLRL-LRLR. After you've practiced these pages, hopefully you'll have the moves memorized, and know how they lay vs. a paradiddle, and won't need to them written out. You can also do the above exercises with any standard funk cymbal rhythm of your choice.

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Stick Control drumset exercise - RRLL and variations

This little series presents a kind of writing problem; it has to be either very short or very long, each of which will hit resistance with users. I've done it the long way, simply because it's the only way anyone may actually practice the thing. The first entry and today's entry are easy enough to figure out on the fly by following simple instructions, but they're good preparation for reading the later entries, so go ahead and read through them.

This is a very basic drumset orchestration for the 8th note sticking exercises found at the beginning of Stick Control, by George L. Stone. We're simply moving the right hand to a cymbal, and playing the bass drum in unison with it, and then doing a number of stock tom tom moves with the left hand. We'll also do them in a triplet rhythm. And practice any very similar exercises found in Stone— for example, today's starting pattern is RRLL; you should run the same steps with LLRR, RLLR, and LRRL.

We've opted to be very thorough with the tom moves, covering all possible combinations, and it it will take quite of bit of time to get through all of them. Which is a good thing— tricking you into playing the basic pattern for longer than you would have is half the point. The patterns we're covering are very fundamental, and you want to be really good at them in a variety of rhythms, tempos, dynamics, and movements around the drums. Note that we're in 2/2— cut time— so each measure is two beats long, and we're playing a four-note subdivision— treat these exercises as you would 16th notes in 2/4. You can also play the 12/8 versions of the exercises (on page 2) as sixtuplets in 2/4.

I've only written out left hand moves, but you can also move your right hand between cymbals. Just improvise those moves as you play through the written exercises; if you try to be systematic about it you'll never finish this thing.

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Stick Control drumset exercise - basic

This is the type of thing I usually wouldn't bother writing out, the instructions are so simple, but the more advanced variations are challenging enough that you'll want to see them on paper. So let's start with the very basics.

What we are doing is playing the first exercises in Stick Control on the drumset. Today we're using the very simple RLRL pattern from page 5. R-indicated notes are played with the right hand on a cymbal, with the bass drum in unison; L-indicated notes are played with the left hand moving around the snare or toms, according to a set of stock moves.

We're in 2/2, so we'll be playing a four note subdivision— functionally “16th notes.” You could count the rhythms 1e&a 2e&a if you wanted. Set your metronome to half note = 60 or faster. For the 12/8 version, set your metronome to dotted quarter note = 60 or faster. Play the RLRL exercises which I've written out, then apply the same orchestration/moves to the LRLR sticking.

Adding the left foot: In 2/2 you can play quarter notes, half notes, or the 2 and 4 (counting in 4/4). In 12/8 put the hihat on dotted quarter notes, or the 2 and 4— remember 12/8 is a compound (“triplet” subdivision) meter counted in 4, with the beat falling on a dotted quarter note rhythm. The simple way to put that is:12/8 = triplets in 4.

Learn this straightforward template well; we'll be applying it to a few other Stick Control exercises, and maybe some related things not found in that book.

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Stone method for uptempo jazz — 01

Most of the regular drumming literature is poorly adapted to the special conditions of very fast tempos in jazz; the practice materials are either too dense, or are triplet-based, which obviously isn't going to work. Playing those tempos is a major topic of discussion online— a little bit out of proportion for how often you have to do it in the field, actually— but most of the conversation is centered around technique for playing the ride pattern repetitively— not much about comping and actually playing music. I gave a paradiddle-diddle method a couple of years ago, and there are some good things in John Riley's books, but for the most part what is offered are strategies, or guidelines, rather than actual practice materials.

So here we have here is the beginning of a method, applying the first few pages of Stick Control to a few written exercises. We'll be seeing more of these as I develop them.

Each exercise has four comping notes, to which you will apply the stickings in Stone, playing the bass drum where there's an R, and the snare drum where there's an L. Usually it will suffice to just use Stone exercises 1-13, but you could also do ex. 63-72 to test your fluency. The cymbal pattern is mainly quarter notes; we'll be introducing the familiar three-note grouping strategically, to fit the comping rhythm. You can add extra measures of time (either quarter notes, or the regular jazz time pattern, or improvised variations on the cymbal) between exercise phrases, if you want.

Practicing these in a tempo range of around half note = 143-175 should cover you for almost any situation you're ever going to encounter; I would master that range of tempos before worrying about going into the truly stratospheric tempos. Try not to go below ~HN=120-130 to start, and don't swing the 8th notes, even when playing the exercises in medium-up tempo ranges, where you would normally swing the 8ths in jazz. You can check out my old list of tempos of famous recordings to see how you're doing compared to your favorite drummers/recordings.

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