Simple four limb unison warmups

Here's a set of simple four limb warm ups, that are heavy on the unisons... an underrated practice item. Take your pick, run p. 38 of Syncopation with 4-5 of these, at a reasonably bright speed, before a rehearsal or gig. 

If you can't do any of them— take half an hour and work them out, you may be missing the boat on something basic coordination-wise, there's a hidden weak spot in there that may be interfering with you in other areas.  

 

Summaries of all of those systems: 

1. Play the melody rhythm with all limbs in unison. 

2-4. Play melody rhythm on cymbal and bass drum, fill in spaces with snare drum/hihat (played w/foot). 

Play with R on cym / L on snare 

L on cym / R on snare

alternating sticking

5. Play melody rhythm with both hands in unison, fill in spaces with both feet in unison. 

6-9. Play melody rhythm with three limbs in unison, running 8th note on remaining limb: 

hands + BD over HH (foot)
hands + HH (foot) over bass drum
feet + LH over RH
feet + RH over LH 

10-12. Same as 2-4, with swing interpretation, filling in triplets. 

13. Same as 5, swing interpretation filling in triplets. 

14-17. Same as 6-9, swing interpretation with triplets. 

And of course, you may want to do the 8th note things in a swing interpretation. 

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[h/t to my student Matt S. for mentioning #5 as something Dejohnette was doing, setting this whole thing off.]

Jazz coordination - feet in unison

This page is for one of my students— his jazz playing has a nice feel with just his hands, but with the feet involved it gets a little uncentered. So we're going to experiment with remedying that by playing the feet in unison. Probably it wouldn't hurt for others to do a little bit of that. 

We'll be working through these at slow to moderate tempos, ~60-110 bpm. 

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Wrong stickings game

I'm hard at work on a new book right now, and the only way I'll finish it is if I write the whole thing at once, so here is an absolute throwaway item to keep you amused in the mean time.

My harmonic coordination series— based on Dahgren & Fine— involves basically doing something normal in a way that makes no sense. Perhaps with the idea that it will set up something different to happen, and make it easier for us to make unplanned moves. 

I thought, for fun, let's try that the most bonehead normal thing there is, a rock beat:

The top letter on the stickings = hihat, the bottom letter = snare drum. Add bass drum however you like. 

It's not really a game, it's just something to screw with for a minute. The way I practice, and play, doing something stupid for no reason generates ideas, it sets up something different to happen. I used to never be able to make it through a page of stuff because I'd spend the whole practice session developing the first couple of things. Try it out, play a couple of these and let them go somewhere. Print it out, try it once, toss it.   

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P. 38 canon

This is purely a writing experiment, pay no attention. Like, run away to some other web site right now. 

Actually this is a pretty good exercise for working up an Ed Blackwell kind of solo texture, if you played it on the tom toms. I just took good old p. 38 from Reed and transcribed it for two hands, with the second part displaced by an 8th note. This kind of coordination happens a lot in Latin drumming as well. 

There are really just two major combinations at work here, which I've highlighted on the segments labeled “warm up pattern.” Practice those a little bit by themselves, and you should be good to go. To make an Ed Blackwell thing out of it, play your hands on two different tom toms, add BD on 1/3, HH on 2/4, or both feet in unison on 1/3. 

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Harmonic coordination summary

I never did a really good summary for my harmonic coordination system (which I've variously called Harmonic Coordination Whatsis or Harmonic Coordination Improved, etc), let's do that now. I use it a lot in teaching, with all levels of students. There's some very useful, practical, and fundamental stuff hiding in this seemingly very advanced system. 
   

1. WHAT IS THIS? WHAT ARE WE DOING?
The harmonic coordination section from Dahlgren & Fine's Four-Way Coordination is one of the hardest, most pain-in-the-neck things things to practice in drumming literature. That method basically involves playing two different Stick Control type patterns with the hands and feet, at the same time, e.g.:
 

What were seeing there is the hands playing a sticking of LLRR RRLL, while the feet are playing LLLR RRRL. I've complained about that at length elsewhere.  

NOTE: They called it “harmonic” because it's an independence system 

based on unisons. I've continued calling it that just out of respect 

for the source materials, it really doesn't mean anything. 

2. MY WAY
After months of hacking away at that, I figured out how to approach it rationally, graded from very easy to very difficult, while also being more reflective of real life drumming. Essentially, playing accent patterns in different stickings, orchestrated for four limbs on the drum set.    

The quickest way to understand it is to look at Accents & Rebounds by George L. Stone. 

See: accent patterns with different stickings:

The orchestration we'll use is: 

Play the accents on a cymbal, with bass drum in unison.
Play non-accents on the snare drum, with hihat/foot in unison. 

So the first two measures of the Stone exercises above would be played like this: 

...using whichever sticking is indicated on that line.  

To me, using the left foot that way is an advanced option. Playing it in unison with the snare drum doesn't serve any normal drumming purpose; it's just a convenient way of disciplining the left foot. A more productive thing for normal playing would be to play a regular rhythm with the left foot— quarter notes, 8th notes, etc. With younger students I leave it off altogether. 

You could just do my system using Accents & Rebounds and be done with it, but I start people with some simpler accent patterns from the book Syncopation, and some basic sticking patterns, which we'll memorize. 

3. PRACTICE PATTERNS - STICKINGS
We start with some very basic 8th note accent patterns in Syncopation, with the above orchestration (leaving the left foot out, at first), with some very ordinary stickings, for players of all levels:

1. All right hand: RRRR
2. All left hand: LLLL
3. All with both hands in unison: HHHH
4. RH plays all cymbal notes, LH plays all snare notes
5. Alternating starting with the right hand: RLRL
6. Alternating starting with the left hand: LRLR

We ease into more advanced stickings by changing stickings in increments, without stopping: 

1. One measure all R / one measure all L - RRRR RRRR LLLL LLLL
2. Two beats all R / two beats all L - RRRR LLLL 
3. Doubles - RRLL RRLL 

Or:

1. One measure RLRL / one measure LRLR  -  RLRL RLRL LRLR LRLR
2. Two beats RLRL / two beats LRLR  -  RLRL LRLR
3. Doubles, starting with one single  -  RLLR RLLR 

Beyond that you can learn the following stickings, and all of the paradiddle inversions:

RRRL RRRL
LLLR LLLR
RLLL RLLL
LRRR LRRR

RLRR LRLL
RLLR LRRL
RRLR LLRL
RLRL LRLR

If all that isn't enough for you, you can use the remaining stickings from pp. 5-7 of Stick Control. 

4. PRACTICE PATTERNS - ACCENTS
Accent patterns to practice can be found in Syncopation by Ted Reed, pp. 47-63. Or any other book including accented singles in an even rhythm. 

You can also derive more complex accent patterns from the syncopated practice rhythms in Reed— accent the 8th notes to correspond with the practice rhythms:  

Clearly, it's endless. There's no way to do it completely, and no need to. You'll know when you've had enough. At some point it will become more productive to focus on more conventional advanced materials. I strongly recommend doing this system with a playalong track. 

Scroll through the posts under the harmonic coordination label for a lot of other writing about this, including some ways of doing it for specific purposes— funk drill, rock drill, triplets, etc. 

More notes on Dahlgren & Fine

I've continued working on the harmonic portion of Dahlgren & Fine's Four Way Coordination— the basic exercises in 4/4, on pp. 15-18— since it's so bloody difficult, I'm writing about it a lot. Around here, extra difficult things demand extra justification. I think this whole area is best for people who can already play, but who want to clean some stuff up, do some foundation work. Regular students, use your judgment.  

I've been drilling the full measure exercises on those pages, at quarter note = 128 (I use a loop from the John Zorn tune Beeroth)— about half the ridiculous half note = 120 that's written in the book. I want to work it up into ~ quarter note = 160s range. See my November post for the easiest, fastest path to being able to play them.  

I orchestrate the patterns on the drum set this way:  

Either hand + bass drum  =  hit a cymbal
Either hand + hihat  =  hit the snare drum 

Adding that movement makes the exercises harder, but more musically logical... which makes them easier. I'm normally oriented around finding the easiest way to do things; this whole area is about practicing hard, inconvenient ways of doing things. Which frees up our mobility when improvising, and builds a stronger framework the other stuff we play. The hyperactive left foot seems to be setting us up for playing uptempo jazz.   

I'm beginning to look for ways of developing Dahlgren & Fine's system further, beginning with the first two numbered systems from page 15— the simplest patterns on these pages, which have either RH/RF together all the time, or LH/RF together all the time.   

Here's the first measure of the first system written in normal notation: 

First two easy things: play all snare drum notes as flams. This is similar to a rock drill I wrote about in 2019. Play left handed flams when the right hand is on the cymbal.  

And right handed flams when the left hand is on the cymbal:

You could also play all the cymbal notes with both hands, with the snare drum played as written: 

An easy thing to do would be to play a 16h note double with the hands on the last note before alternating to the other hand: 

At slower tempos you could do make that double with the feet as well.  

Or fill in a 16th note anticipating an alternating stroke— with the LH when alternating from R to L, or with the BD when switching from L to R: 

This would get pretty complicated on the paradiddle inversion patterns:
 

Becomes:
 

That way deserves some more examples— there are some other possibilities that I like a lot. Developing that would be easier if you start with the four note patterns— half a measure. 

Another way, which is similar to what Joe Morello does with Stick Control, in his own Master Studies books, you can fill in all the spaces with the opposite hand or foot, to make 16th notes. Again, I fill with the left hand and right foot only: 

Or Morello's way— he doesn't fill between alternating strokes: 

Just some ideas. Obviously it becomes much more complex after the first two systems on p. 15, where you may have either hand playing in unison with either foot within a single pattern. 

The idea with thinking about these variations is not to create more things to practice, but just to be aware of some natural directions the original patterns can go in actual playing. I might mostly practice the book patterns, and momentarily try these out while doing that, to be able to make that direction change; and to see which make sense to practice on their own.

Back to Dahlgren & Fine

Basic unit of Dahlgren & Fine

UPDATE: I've been hitting this all week, covering most of the pages in question every day, tempo around quarter note = 126. It's very interesting— all kinds of unrelated stuff just starts flowing. Practicing all of these illogical disjointed unisons seems to smooth out a lot of hidden structural hang ups keeping that other stuff from flowing, or from coming out easily. It's pretty cool.  

I did something very cruel to a student recently— we did two entire lessons on the harmonic portion of Four-Way Coordination by Marvin Dahlgren & Elliot Fine. Perhaps you've heard of it. The book is famously a real pain in the A— I feel like I've complained pretty copiously about that fact in the last 8-10 years. 

I mostly stopped using the book— my own harmonic method covers the same territory, and is vastly superior; it has a clearer musical purpose, and it can (and should) be adapted for students of all levels. Scroll through these posts to learn more. Or, heck, call me for a lesson. 

But 4WC is a famous book, a lot of people own it, and they want to know how to deal with it, so let me give you my strategy for learning that brutal harmonic section on pp. 15-18. We'll talk about playing single measures repeating— eight note patterns. Doing just the four note patterns seems like a good way to start, but that's not necessarily easier. 

There are no instruments indicated on the staff, just RH, LH, RF, LF. I recommend: with the hands, hit a cymbal on notes that are in unison with the bass drum (right foot, presumably), and hit the snare drum on notes that are in unison with the hihat (left foot). Your hands will have to move between the snare and cymbals. That's a normal orchestration, with normal hand moves you want to be practicing. It's the whole point of doing this. Musical independence has to involve the parts of the actual instrument, used in their normal roles.  
 

The first two numbered systems on p. 15 are straightforward; the top staff has the right hand in unison with the bass drum, the bottom staff has the left hand in unison with the bass drum. Use them as a warm up. Starting on system 3 are the harder combinations, where either hand could be played in unison with either foot, on the cymbals or snare drum. 

First, look for all the measures that have four notes in a row with either the hands or the feet. On page 16, that would be these: 

Job 1: Play all of those on pp. 15-18. Hit cymbal when in unison with the bass drum, hit snare drum when in unison with the hihat played with the foot. 

Then look for patterns with four in row on the hands or feet when you repeat the measure. On p. 16, that includes most of the remaining patterns: 

This vastly simplifies our problem— just play a sticking pattern with the hands or feet, along with four notes played with one opposite limb. Very importantly, this gets us away from the idea of starting everything on the 1— to do it this easy way, start playing the pattern wherever in the measure the four in a row starts.  


Job 2: Learn all the remaining measures with four notes in a row with that hands or the feet. You've now learned 80% of the material on these pages. 

Next, look for the patterns with a RLRL-LRLR in the hands or the feet— that we haven't already played in Job 1 or 2. There are two of those on p. 15: 

This will be more of a challenge. You could start by playing just the RLRL (with the opposite part), and then the LRLR— one time only, or repeating. Then play RLRL-L, and LRLR-R— one time only.
  

Job 3: Learn any remaining patterns including an RLRL-LRLR in the hands or feet. 

Some people may find it easier to do this portion based on the RRLR-LLRL sticking— in that case, look for all instances of that in the hands or feet, that you didn't do in Jobs 1 or 2. 

Once you've done this, you've essentially learned all of the full measure patterns on these pages. 

Observe: 

If you look closely and don't always start reading on the 1, you'll notice that all of the remaining patterns are based on that same RLRL/LRLR pattern— a paradiddle inversion. The highlighted spots below from p. 16 show the RLRL or LRLR in each of those measures— so you'll be playing the exact patterns you already learned, just not starting on the 1:

Note that there will be more than one option— on all of these remaining patterns, both the hands and feet are playing paradiddle inversions, each of which can be played as RLRL-LRLR, starting at different places in the measure. 

Job 4: Learn the few remaining patterns orienting off the RLRL-LRLR in the hands or feet, wherever that begins in the measure. 

The upshot: after the first two easy systems, there are 56 measures total, each played two different ways— hands reversed on the lower staff. A whopping 45 measures have that easy four in a row with the hands or the feet; the remaining 11 have the RLRL/LRLR in the hands or feet, or an inversion of that. Learn that one hard pattern, and learn to start it off the 1, and you've learned the system. 

All of the one measure patterns, anyway. You can do different combinations of the lettered 4-note patterns to make different one measure, 8-note patterns. We've been doing AC and BD. You could also do AB/CD, and AD/BC. Now you have a strategy for doing that. 

Make no mistake, this is a nightmare mission, but at least now we can make some kind of systematic assault. Figure it out, and you'll be one of the elite few— for all the tens of thousands of copies of this book sold— who has ever done anything meaningful at all with this part of this book. 

Delayed continuity

I've been looking some piano literature lately, reading an old book called Practising the Piano (British spelling) by Frank Merrick. You can get it on Scribd without having to pay anyone but Scribd. Another site giving away a lot of content, making sure they get paid, if nobody else does. Let's talk about a thing Merrick calls delayed continuity— it's a useful phrase, whether or not we decide to practice the way he suggests: 

Some music is very easy to play phrase by phrase with pauses in between:  

 

If the pauses are so long that each phrase is mentally or actually sung a tempo before it is played, the player will benefit by this forethought and often excel previous efforts on the spot. If each phrase is also followed by a further pause for reflection and self-criticism the successful playing can be noted as worthy of retention and the unsuccessful as models of what to avoid. The threefold ritual can be abbreviated into three verbs, "plan, play, judge"[...]

Remember that the pause must always be at least as long as the phrase to come. The following shows the minimum length of pauses for Ex. 1:  

 

This leaves no extra time for criticising your efforts and if the thinking is a really expressive mental rehearsal of what is to come (rather than an apathetic conning over of the mere notes) it will be preferable to add a breathing space to the minimum pause. When the time is also taken for self-criticism, all sorts of practical questions like “Did the fingering, pedaling, etc, all conduce to give me a recognizable copy of  that mental rehearsal?” can be seriously faced. 

Sometimes the desire to try the phrase over and over again is irresistible, but think it through again first. Do not play twice on one mental rehearsal if you can withstand the violent temptation to do so which comes from an over-eager spirit. In this emulate not a hockey player but a golfer. When the latter misses the ball he repeats a very solemn and impressive ceremony known as “addressing the ball” before carrying out a second attempt. 

It's very similar to the way I teach independence/coordination on the drums— except I don't use the word “conduce” in my inner monologue. I use added stops or fermatas to group complex coordination items into manageable bits, and give time to think about what is the next thing. Drumming practice is usually very repetitive, so we'll often just be adding pauses to a single measure of a pattern. Like in my “skiplet” method*, I'll put a fermata on the 1 and 3. When teaching a Mozambique, I'll put a fermata on the rests, or quarter notes. The thinking-ahead phase takes the form of counting the rhythm of the upcoming part, and thinking through the four-way sticking. The criticism phase is instantaneous, and almost unnecessary. If you're doing it right, there will be no mistakes— you go slow enough, with small enough chunks of the overall pattern,  that you can do it perfectly. 

* - I'm too embarrassed to actually say that dumb word skiplet now. I just say spangalang for that little chunk of pattern. 

Playing the drums as a jazz musician is very different from being a concert pianist; Their job is deep learning of lengthy, very involved composed pieces, to be performed perfectly, note for note; there's a serious mental discipline involved with that, which Merrick's method serves— it should also be useful in concert percussion, when learning and memorizing a piece. 

A jazz drummer's job is to improvise a developing texture, with huge latitude for what exact notes are acceptable, if they're played in time. For a concert pianist unplanned notes are mistakes; for drummers unplanned notes are virtually the plan. But this tactic of suspending the time in logical places— usually by making a long note longer— to give yourself a chance to think through the upcoming coordination and count the rhythm, is very useful. 

A needlessly difficult book

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few weeks. I wasn't going to post it, but I'm having a hard time finishing anything lately. So here we are: 

A book I've never seen before, Drumming In All Directions, by David Dieni, a drummer/percussionist from the Bay Area, was mentioned on a drumming forum, and I want to give a few opinionated comments on what I see in the online preview. I'm not bringing it up to try to sell you on not buying somebody's book— I want to use it to talk about what I want in practice materials, and why— and maybe give some things to think about for others who write.    

What's in the book is real stuff— I, and others, do some similar things using Reed, Dahlgren & Fine, and other books— I just don't dig this presentation. 

Just in terms of understanding what we're supposed to do, the book doesn't go easy on us explaining its methods. This example illustrates the book's system, and wow:

I already know what he's doing, and it's hard for me to figure it out from reading that. The concept is to play some composed two-voice practice phrases, using a few different coordination systems— actually unison stickings: 

Hands vs. Feet - RH/LH vs. RF/LF
Right Side vs. Left Side - RH/RF vs. LH/LF
Opposite side unisons - RH/LF vs. LH/RF 

It's quite similar to the harmonic coordination section of Dahlgren & Fine. He also uses some worked out tom moves, as I do, and many others. So far, so good— you could do the same thing with those stickings with Reed (filling in the gaps in the written rhythm) or Stone (substituting those stickings for the Rs and Ls).   

My major problem is that the practice phrases (called groove melodies in the book— really they're solo phrases) are just very remote from musical reality as I know it. For example, I never want to look at anything like this when I'm practicing the drums:

I don't understand the purpose of writing these exercises as 32nd notes— I don't consider this level of fluency with reading them to be an essential skill for a drummer. I don't believe I've ever read a 32nd note in the course of playing music professionally, and I read them pretty rarely when practicing drum set. If I were ever to play anything similar to that in real life, I would be thinking in terms of 16th notes double timed. Maybe even 8th notes quadruple timed.

Materials written for two voices, or written as a sticking, do have a purpose, but most of the time I want to practice, play, read, and think in terms of a single melody rhythm, and inferring the second voice— Reed style. These phrases have rests, which are hard to duplicate with standard Reed methods or Stone-type sticking patterns. But if that were considered very important, we could devise some methods to include rests, and then improvise some similar things. Which in the end is the entire point— learning to improvise.   

I'm also not fond of the drum-theoretical content. For example, there is a lengthy description of drumming coordination as a progression from “control of individual limbs” to “independence” to “interdependence”:

I don't recognize this from my own experience at all. Independence is not a step along the way to interdependence, it's simply a defunct theory of how drumming coordination works. At every step of development, there is only deliberate coordination of parts, or there is guessing at it. 

How you write these things is important, because so much of drumming involves people figuring things out for themselves— no matter how good of instruction and information they get, they still have to figure it out in the practice room. So when a major topic like coordination is badly framed, it misguides readers' thinking and gets them pursuing phantom abilities, and it's a massive time waster.    

In the end, it's not difficult to write a lot of hard stuff to play on the drums; it's more difficult to present it clearly, and communicate clearly, and to make it relevant to the real world of playing music. And to be economical with the demands you make on people's time practicing it. It's not that this is a terrible book (from what I see in the preview)— I think it's needlessly difficult for what it aims to achieve for users. 

Linear 8ths in 9/8 - 02

We're doing a lot with triplets and compound-meter 8th notes these days— here with a linear pattern in 9/8, with inversions. See this last similar page, and my page of linear double paradiddles/paradiddle-diddles— still one of the more useful single pages I've posted on this site. 

The first half of the page has the pattern starting on the snare drum, the second half has it starting with the bass drum. Practice these on the snare drum and bass drum, along with any cymbal rhythm of your choice. Right now I just play them in a jazz waltz feel. 

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Page o' skiplets - UPDATED

UPDATE: Boy, I suck— it turns out this thing is riddled with typos in the 4/4 versions. I'll let you know when I've posted the corrected version...

You know, instead of saying “skiplets”— a very stupid word I made up for the repeating three-note pattern of the standard jazz cymbal rhythm— I could have just said spangalang. It's real jock-sounding and I hate it, but I could have named this system something pompous like Spangalang Theory. The Spangalang Method. Maybe I'll do that with the book.  

I've updated the original page o' skiplets somewhat— for use with a couple of students. I wrote out each skiplet coordination unit in it's normal orientation and environment, in a full measure of 4/4 time. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose, but there you are.

I also circled some notes, which could be played on the bass drum. So you can play the snare part 1) all on the snare drum, 2) all on the bass drum, 3) circled notes on bass drum, uncircled notes on the snare drum. Here's the explanation of this system.  

It is an excellent system for learning jazz coordination quickly and completely, or for correcting weak coordination— much more satisfactory than the traditional way where someone assigns you some pages from Chapin and you go in the practice room and bash them out, with inconsistent results. 

I don't think these pages are completely successful, though. A better way to teach and learn this system might be to use a conventional resource like Advanced Techniques, and draw a phrase mark over the relevant portion. It does need to be done with a teacher (me, because I don't know of anyone else who teaches this way) there are too many ways for a student to misunderstand it, if he or she doesn't already know the terrain a little bit.  

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Linear 8ths in 9/8 - 01

This is how it is, I get busy teaching, doing my taxes, preoccupied with other stuff, and not able to hit the drums for a week, and everything dries up. No ideas and I feel like a fraud. Then I sit down once and everything clicks, and it's hard not to stop to write things down. I'm just working on my stuff, I'm not trying to write more drum crap. 

This is similar to this recent page of double paradiddle / paradiddle-diddle inversions, voiced on the snare drum and bass drum. I use that page a lot in my own practicing, and wanted to extend the idea a little further. Here we're doing the same idea in 3 [9/8 = "triplet feel" in 3, yes?], mostly alternating, with one double. 1-9 have the double on the snare drum, 10-18 have the double on the bass drum. 

Use these however you like, I'm mostly doing them with a jazz waltz cymbal and hihat rhythm. You could also add cymbal in unison with the snare drum part, or in unison with the bass drum part. The real animals can add one of my quasi-Afro/Cuban cymbal rhythms in 9/8. Start with this one if you're going to try that.  

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Bothadiddles

A small item for your consideration and experimentation.  

On a drumming forum, a user was complaining that practicing paradiddles didn't seem to improve his hand independence— he was working on some Chapin Advanced Techniques patterns, and was hoping the paradiddles would improve his facility with that. The answers given were all over the map, and largely based on misconceptions stemming from the use of the word independence. Aided, I think, by the notational convention of writing drum patterns as separate rhythms, as if they're played by multiple performers. 

My answer was, sure paradiddles are independent, you're doing two totally different rhythms with each hand; the right hand plays 1 &a e and the left hand plays e 2 &a. You may say psha those are just backward versions of each other... and I arrogantly retort: that means you're playing the same rhythm forward and backward at the same time! Sounds pretty independent to me. 

Like, look, independence:

In fact, independence = you playing one thing. 

Whatever people's theories about how independence works, we're dealing with one controller— you— playing one rhythm— that of all the parts combined— using sequences of  Rs, Ls, and both hands in unison. That's 100% of what hand independence is. What else is it?  

If paradiddles aren't independent-seeming enough, add some unisons— play the following patterns with your right hand on the hihat, left hand on the snare. B = both hands at the same time. 

RLRR LRLL

BLRR LRLL
RBRR LRLL
RLBR LRLL
RLRB LRLL
RLRR BRLL
RLRR LBLL
RLRR LRBL
RLRR LRLB


Those are all at least as hard as the patterns in Chapin, and they sound independent, but done this way, they're easy to execute. So what's the difference? Mainly, they're non-mysterious, and there is no misguiding notation or language tricking you into thinking about it, and doing, it the hardest way possible.

I'm interested in other things right now, but this may be a productive way of practicing for someone: Go through the first pages of stick control and play each note of the patterns as Bs. People who have their flam rudiments together may find it easier to think of the both-hands notes as flams.  

I suggest starting with: 

RRRL
RLRR 
RLRR LRRL 
RLLR LLRL
RLLR RLLR
RLLR LLRL LRLL RLRL

RLRR will be very helpful with those Chapin exercises— try replacing two and three Rs with Bs, and you'll have most of those patterns covered.  

At the very least, a little bit of this kind of practice should be good conditioning for other systems of independence coordination, and for completely resetting your approach to this topic. 

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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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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From the zone: two-note coordination patterns

From Manuel in Augsburg, Germany. We've met a couple of times in my travels— in Berlin and in Augsburg, and I got to help him put together a really nice set of Cymbal & Gong cymbals— a 22" ride and some other things. He's sent in a little Chaffee-esque library of all possible combinations of two-note patterns for four limbs:

Manuel says “I practice it on the set as a warm-up to 'remove friction' (as some authors put it) and to work on balance between the different volume levels of Ride, Snare, Bass and Hi Hat.” 

I may try it— I always had a problem with things like this (see Chaffee's Time Functioning book, Dahlgren & Fine), because I wouldn't know when it was OK to stop. Now I'm more able to just play through something once. Get through it in however long is reasonable. 

New Joel Rothman book - Ambidexterity

So new I have to use this
crappy scan I did myself.

I just received a new book in the mail:

Ambidexterity
The Holy Grail for Total Independence At The Drum Set 
by Joel Rothman
41 pages. 

Joel Rothman has got to be the most prolific drum author in the world. He must have written at least 100 books in approximately the last 60 years. Many of them are micro-focused on one issue, others are extremely expansive— to the extent that they sometimes duplicate each other's material. Surprisingly(?) a lot of his stuff is quite modern, and he has a lot of good materials for developing an Elvin Jones type of thing, an ECM feel, and Jack Dejohnette's playing-fast-at-slow-tempos thing. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with his catalog, and don't hesitate to order any titles related to you your current interests. 

Rothman and I share a practical focus, and we agree on a number of basic principles— one of which is that writing practice ideas different ways, in a different context, helps you practice more productively. So the idea for this book is not necessarily new, but it's written in a way that should be useful for people getting deep into a certain thing— putting it in a single volume is a major help in developing this one idea. 

This book has the look of a technical library, with a lot of patterns written as two drumming voices, on opposite stems— as you see on the cover of the book. The rhythms generally overlap, and swap each other in the second measure or beat. There are some linear patterns with no unisons, which are more ordinary; I imagine they're included as warmups. Patterns are mostly written as 8th/16th note combinations in 4/4 or 2/4. There are also patterns with 16th note triplets; and with 8ths in 6/8, 9/8, and 12/8. And with 8ths and 16ths in 5/8 and 7/8.    

The idea is that you practice the patterns with every combination of individual hands/feet, and with unisons of both hands and both feet vs. the remaining single limbs. I would suggest also doing them with right hand/right foot unisons, and left hand/left foot unisons.

This would be a good book for anyone developing an independence-heavy way of playing. There's plenty of that going around the drumming world. Jazz drummers working on an Ed Blackwell kind of thing will like it— you could play the hands on the tom toms with a simple rhythm in the feet for a crash course in that type of playing. It could also just function as a Stick Control like “conditioning” manual.

It seems like a rather dense, abstract book, but I think it's pretty accessible for ambitious students, and it stays within the realm of musical reality. The right student or teacher to do a lot of useful practice with it. As with any purely technical study, students should have an idea of where to go with it musically— played with a funk interpretation, or Latin interpretation, or ECM-like interpretation, mainly. 

Get Ambidexterity and other books from JoelRothman.com.

UPDATE A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER: I've been practicing this book a bit, and it's quite enjoyable. It's an alternative kind of independence study, that's a little different from everything else I do. There are some interesting things happening with resolving these patterns and playing them— it exercises your brain in a special way. 

Three Camps for drum set - inverted - 05

Another page working on normal jazz drumset vocabulary using Three Camps— we're sort of inverting the basic version, except I've taken a few liberties with it to make a normal Elvin-like texture out of it. 

I really like this whole method, and I think it is really worth your while to learn it, figuring out all the correct form for each version. It's easy when you do it. It's really good for people who like clearly-defined lesson assignments, or for undisciplined people like me who tend to drift into creative practice rather than practice things thoroughly.

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Three Camps for drumset - 16th notes / basic - 04

This is the basic form of Three Camps for drumset, converted into 16th notes. I continue to dig this format for practicing jazz coordination. For me the main attraction of this page is the Elvin-like thing we see at the end of measure C of the first version, and throughout the page. We really get to polish that sucker. 

Check the form carefully for each version— each version has the measures in a different order. It's not as difficult/weird as it seems.  

You can play these substituting the left foot for the bass drum— in that case ignore the written hihat part. Doing it that way, at faster tempos I might eliminate the second note of any double— on the a-1 or a-3 in measure D of the first version, for example. Play the hihat on the a, don't play it on the 1.  

You could also mix things up by playing the 1e-a rhythm (on whatever beats it occurs) as a triplet, as in the original triplet version of this page, and play the full beats of 16ths as 16ths. That's a thing Elvin Jones does a lot. 

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Alternating triplets displaced

Developing an independence idea that has been happening spontaneously in my practicing— triplets alternating between the snare drum and bass drum, with odd breaks.

Play the foot part with the bass drum or hihat. These are not necessarily intended to be played in the written time signature— that just indicates the length of the complete idea. You can play them in 4/4 or 3/4, running over the barline. You can also start them on any beat of the pattern. Add hihat and vary the cymbal rhythm however you like. 

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