Three Camps in 3

A few practice items coming up. Here's the traditional rudimental item Three Camps converted into 3/4 time, two different ways— accenting the quarter notes, or accenting the swing dotted half notes. That latter is harder than I expected.  

Something about doing it in 3 encourages you do it faster— I like Three Camps for working on fast singles. And the piece is 50% longer, so it will help your endurance. 

Learn each phrase by itself, then put the phrases together according to the form description to make the complete piece. Play as accented triplets as written, and as rolls, doubling all the unaccented notes. 

 

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Accents in Reed

TOTAL nerd stuff here. I use the accent pages in Progressive Steps to Syncopation (pp. 47-49) with my students for convenience, but I find them be a pain. They're thorough, but poorly balanced— so if students (e.g. me) just start on line 1 and try to plow through it, they (e.g. me) are going to burn out about halfway through the first page, and never get to the interesting ones. To do this stuff year after year you have to manage your interest, and that of your students. You can't reasonably expect people to motivate themselves by brute force forever.  

I think I need to start marking this book up with a four-color pen. Bracket off each section in black, circle the good exercises in green, the critical ones in red, whatever. Get out my 50mm acrylic marker and black out everything I hate. Something. 

Here are how those pages are organized, with my suggestions on which ones to include in general practicing. Whether you like my line choices or not, when covering this topic students should be playing at least a few lines from each category:


Lead hand accents - Lines 1-10
Most of the first page of exercises, and quite dull. I may have students play four or five of these, for different reasons. Shave it down to lines 1, 2, 6, and 9.   

Two accents together - Lines 11-14 
Only four lines, no problem. Always do lines 11 and 14. 

Off hand accents - Lines 15-22
Inverse of the lead hand accents. Lines 16, 18, 21, 22. 

Mixed accents - Lines 23-28
These are the interesting ones, and the most useful for learning to play accents well. There aren't many of them, but we're just using this as preparation for playing accented 8ths as an interpretation, using the regular exercises earlier in the book.  

Single accent displaced - Lines 1-2, 15-16
That's an important set of exercises, too bad they're on two different pages. 

Here: I've pared down those pages by about 30%, and dragged things around into the order I would have wanted them, with the four single accent patterns grouped together at the end. Print these out and put them in your copy of Syncopation: 

 

By the way, I don't just use these pages for their intended purpose— playing alternating accented singles on the snare drum. I'll use them for getting into applications like my rock drill, or harmonic coordination method. 

I rarely use the other non-8th note accent pages. Never the dotted-8th/16th pages. The triplet pages are most useful, they're also an organizational mess. Perhaps I'll pick them apart on another occasion. 

If you like reading my complaining about this book, also check out my itemized critique of it from another occasion. 

Accents on 8/8 jazz rhythms

A background project lately has been to create some ways of practicing feathering the bass drum as part of a modern, varying, organic jazz texture. This page is related to some things I'm hearing in the ongoing Elvin Jones transcription, and is also somewhat related to my harmonic coordination system... which is (accidentally) very much like the first part of Stone's Accent & Rebounds. We're playing some basic SD/BD 8th note combinations in a jazz setting, and adding accents to them, and ghosting/feathering the unaccented parts: 

Add the accents from the bottom half of the page to the drum set patterns at the top. Swing the 8th notes, play the hihat on beats 2 and 4, and keep the cymbal at a steady volume. You can get your accents from any source you want— from Syncopation, for example. It would be easy to greatly expand this concept with a lot of other accent patterns and SD/BD patterns, but I don't think that's necessary.   

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Accented singles with rumba clave

I was playing along with a loop sampled from the track below, and wanted to have this page to work with. We're doing accented accented singles— with a three note and five note spacing— along with rumba clave played with the left foot. You can play each line individually, then run 1-3 and 4-8 straight through for the accents to make a running cross rhythm.

When practicing I basically never play anything on the drum set in a “neutral” way— I always use a musical touch, move around the instrument, and vary my sound, dynamics, and articulations. And I'll play whatever variations occur to me as I go. Very often I won't make it through the full page of stuff. It's an organic process. And maintaining the left foot ostinato is not particularly important to me; it's less about making parts and more about learning this clave as a rhythmic form. 

If you want to add bass drum, put it on the & of 2 in the first measure, or maybe the 1 and & of 2.

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Accents in 5/4 - mixed rhythm - 01

Exhibit A for why we keep writing. I was practicing yesterday, and I thought hmmm I want to work on this one thing, and out the thousands of pages of drumming materials in my studio, none of them had this— accent exercises with a changing rhythm. It's not exactly a far-out idea.

The page is in 5/4, but that's not the point— six 8th notes and six triplets is just an easy starting place for this idea, and it happens to make 5/4.

Use an alternating sticking, starting with either hand. Easy variations would be to play the unaccented notes as double strokes, or play the accents as flams. Keeping stick heights consistently low will help your dynamics in combo playing— 4-6" for accents, 1-2" for unaccented notes.

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5/8 accents in a triplet feel

I've worked on triplets and */8 feels a lot in my 35+ years playing the drums, and played a lot of music in the style, and still there's a certain type of shuffle or 12/8 feel that is just easy to mess up. I don't know what's up with that, but I'm working on it quite a bit lately. This is page contains a couple of things that came up when I was improvising along with Stanley Clarke's Lopsy Lu— an example of the style I'm talking about... also an example of the ease of messing it up, because if you listen to Tony Williams's performance on the original recording... it's slightly rough.

These are a couple of 5-note accent patterns broken down and metered in a variety of ways, with the main goal of putting them into 12/8 or a triplet feel in 4. I don't really care about developing this as a 5/8-within-12/8 lick; I'm more just interested in fluency.

Practicing this page is pretty straightforward. Maintain the same 8th note speed through the various meter changes. All of the patterns have an alternating sticking, so you're going to be playing the cymbals accents with both the right and left hand. Snare drum notes can also be played as drags— as double strokes. Moving around the drums is a little weird, but you can attempt that if you want.

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Three Camps - isolated parts and complete piece

UPDATE: Jeez, I'm getting sloppy. Typos in the pdf fixed....

You know, I've never settled on a really satisfactory presentation of Three Camps— the very famous, very old rudimental snare drum piece. It's much simpler than it ever looks on the page, written out, which I take as evidence of its history as an oral tradition.

But I'll keep trying. Here I've written out each individual measure of the piece— there are only four different, closely related things that actually happen— and the complete piece. Don't be thrown by the varying staff lengths, it's meant to be played straight through with no stops.

Usually the piece is played with rolls, but I've written as just accented triplets, which is excellent for developing your singles. I suggest trying that with brushes. Quarter note = 260 would be a good goal. Play the unaccented notes as open drags if you want to play it the traditional way. I'm using the modern ending, with a fp and a measure of crescendo, instead of the goofy old school tag used in Wilcoxon, Mitchell Peters, and elsewhere.

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Stick Control patterns in 3/4, with flams and accents

A little companion to the page of Stone patterns adapted into 3/4, from the other day— here I've added some flams and accents to the sticking patterns from that page:

Quite a few of the exercises have an unaccented note followed by an accented note on the same hand, a common, difficult sequence of notes. Put in a very deliberate upstroke after the little note— pick up the stick fast to get it into position to play the accented note. A lot of people will try to make the two notes into one “whip” stroke— which is often executed more like a “jerk” stroke, which is as wrong as it sounds— I'm not in favor of that, at first. Start by separating the strokes: little note+fast upstroke, then accented downstroke. You can streamline that sequence into one motion after you have the individual parts well under your hands.

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