Guy's cowbell beats

A page for a student, age 12, who bought a cowbell, and didn't know what to do with it. Basically two kinds of beats— basic rock beats, and a kind of Latin-rock beat with a cinquillo rhythm on the bell. We covered a number of these verbally in the lesson— several of them were his idea— this develops them further. 

Get the pdf, then get the vibe by listening to some Def Leppard: 

And Deep Purple:  

Rhythm cycles

Here's a page to print out and staplegun to the wall by your drums: a summary of some major practice rhythms, and their inversions. Sometimes you don't need a readable page, you just need a quick reference to glance at. I should probably expand this and make a poster out of it. I'll certainly be updating it. 

Includes a couple of simple rhythms that don't have a name, and the Charleston rhythm, tresillo, cinquillo, three different rhythms in 3/4, played across the barline in 4/4. 

Play these as independent rhythms along with an ostinato, or in a Reed-style interpretation, or as ensemble rhythms/kicks— at the bottom are some practice phrases for that. Phrases 1 and 3 are good for a kick-type phrase, phrase 2 suggests a rhythm section figure, a la the tune Equinox. Plug in whichever practice rhythm you want in place of the example rhythm, of course. 

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Cinquillodiddles

This one occurred to me thinking about Wilby Fletcher playing with McCoy Tyner...

The cinquillo rhythm— I'm calling it that now for ease of reference— is a very useful one measure Latin rhythm, and a common velocity cymbal rhythm, that can be played, with left hand accompaniment, as a paradiddle inversion: RLRR-LRRL.

So here are a few patterns for playing it on practice pad, with some RH flams added to develop left hand “independence”— the RH rhythm doesn't change. 

And since we did it for the cinquillo, we may as well do it for tresillo. That works, too: RLLR-LLRL. The RH is sparser on that one, so I've added some LH flams to create some variations for the RH part.
    

The accents are a starting place, you can accent however you want. I suggest starting with any single left hand notes. I'm practicing these with drum set in mind, with the RH on a cymbal, so I'm not too worried about perfect snare drumistic form and dynamics on the flams or accents.  

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Page o' coordination: Cinquillo

Here's an easy page o' coordination based on a basic bell rhythm, known in Latin music circles as “cinquillo”— which basically means quintuplet. It's not a quintuplet, it's the indicated 5-note rhythm, but that's what the word means. It's a good rhythm for a variety of Latin feels, or pseudo-Latin feels, especially for bright tempos, R&B situations, show music situations, or situations where the other players aren't real sophisticated, and get thrown off by more complex bell patterns.

Learn all the patterns with your hands only, then add the right and left foot parts, one at a time. Then you can combine the different feet parts. You can move your left hand between the snare (rim click) and high tom for most of these. If you want to get deeper into it, you can do the stock moves I always do with these POCs, and vary your articulations and dynamics— rim shots, dead strokes, buzzes, whatever. Play the right hand on a cowbell, cymbal bell, hihat, or the rim/shell of the floor tom. Play it as rim shots on the snare drum (snares off) for a pseudo-calypso feel.

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