More on that double timing tweak...

Clarifying the method behind that Reed tweak from last week, double timing the very familiar, friendly, happy, easy RH lead Reed system— RH plays book rhythm on a cymbal + bass drum in unison, LH fills in the gaps in the book rhythm on the snare drum. Hopefully you know it well by now. 

The concept is very simple: 

• Play some 8ths as a 16th note double— single 8ths, last 8th in a run with same hand. 
• Play some 8ths as alternating 16ths— single R becomes RL, single L becomes LR. Last 8th, first 8th, or all 8ths. 

We'll use this pattern for the examples: 

Playing single 8ths, or the last in a run of 8ths as a double— LH, RH, both hands: 

You'll never do that before another note on the same hand, so you have to do three in a row. Unless you want to. No reason not to do that too, it's just not what I'm outlining here. 
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Playing a single 8th note L as two alternating 16ths, LR— last 8th, first 8th, or all 8ths.

Or playing a single 8th note R as two alternating 16ths, RL— last 8th, first 8th, or all 8ths: 

And of course you can do whatever of combinations of those things you want, that you can execute while reading from Syncopation:

There are a couple of different ones on that last page. Obviously, the reading part can get rather complicated, so people will want to build it up one step at a time. The thing itself it easy to play, and play fast. That's the whole point. 

It's a lot of stuff, but it shouldn't require a ridiculous amount of time getting through it. It goes fast, and is easy once you have the reading together. And it's not necessarily even about working it out completely, it's about adding some moves when you're improvising. Playing some fast stuff while thinking that simple underlying system. 

Reed tweaks: double timing RH lead

A collection of warmups for adding 16th notes to our good friend the right hand lead Reed system. You can work them up to practice them while reading from Syncopation, or these could be your whole drill. Whatever. 

These are just some things I'm doing, it's not a fully worked out system, not all of these will agree with each other. Some of them are single embellishments, some of them are combinations. You can probably devise some more combinations.

It gets a little complicated practicing out of Reed this way— the underlying melody rhythm can get a little obscured. Build up to the more complex ones by running each individual thing with all of p. 38. If the reading isn't happening, start with pp. 10-11, 30-32, and 34-37. Keep the original plain RH lead system as your point of reference, figure out how each thing is just an embellishment of that. 

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UPDATE: I should have put this on there as well— you'll have to pencil it in on the top two lines. Play each note with the marking as two 16ths. That'll be any snare drum note right before a cymbal note: 

A Funky Primer: double-time feel lesson

Getting back into teaching out of a book I haven't used in some time: A Funky Primer, by my former college professor Charles Dowd. I felt it was getting a little dated, and I was putting all my energy into developing a Syncopation-based rock/funk method (which I'll be releasing in book form whenever I can finish it)... plus a student walked off with my copy. I bought it again recently, and, you know, it's actually quite decent for functional timekeeping vocabulary for any straight-8th note music with a backbeat. Much of the stuff you wouldn't necessarily play verbatim in real music, but it teaches you a lot of important moves. So we're using it again.

Here's a little unit I was doing with a student: a few selected patterns from pages 25 and 28, centered around making a double time feel. I extended the exercises a little bit by making some of the bass drum notes optional— play all the patterns with and without the circled bass drum notes. These are from page 25:

These patterns from page 28 are also helpful:

Altogether, with the optional versions, that's 18 patterns; an easy little unit. Students tend to gravitate towards their own personal “generic” medium tempo, and these double time feel patterns seem to be a good way to instantly get them to play much faster than they're accustomed to.

Double time feel / half time feel

Hm, maybe being extraordinarily busy will force me to finally do some things that are actually accessible to people. Here's another easy thing, illustrating half time feel and double time feel using basic rock beats. Playing a double time or half time feel in this case means halving or doubling the feel rhythmically within the original tempo-- instead of playing the snare drum backbeats on beats 2 and 4, you play them on beat 3, or on the &s of every beat. A true double time or half time involves an actual change in tempo, and would be written the same as the original beat-- the first two measures of each line-- with a written notation telling you to play half (or twice) as fast.

Play each section with repeats and without, then play the entire page without stopping.

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