More rooting around in my archives, with a stealth from the zone item. I found this in one of my notebooks from high school, and it's worth playing, with some mixed 16th note rhythms with flams in funny places. So I wrote it up nicely so people can actually read it:
There are accents on all the flams, and I believe the stickings alternate all the way through.
...aaand as I look at it, it appears that this is just one pattern displaced by a 16th note from line to line. There are a couple of small variations, but those are probably mistakes. See my December page of flammed 16ths for something a little more challenging.
Here's the original sheet scanned from my notebook:
Another small item, while I power through writing my new book: a page of 16th notes with flams, designed to be rather technically challenging, in the manner of Ron Fink's book Chop Busters:
Alternating sticking unless otherwise indicated. The first two reverse hands on the repeat, the others repeat on the same hand.
Let's talk more about me. I just posted a little technique video in response to a forum conversation. Someone was confused about the meanings of the stroke types, and wanted evidence of my competency to speak on the subject. With that handy visual reference, let's talk a little bit about technique.
I do a quick demonstration of the level system stroke types, then flams, an open roll, and Swiss triplets, because that's what the cat wanted:
I say all the time I'm not a technique guy, I'm not a snare drummer, I'm not a chops guy— it doesn't mean I'm not proficient. I can still do most of what most professionals can do on the drum, and more than many. What we're seeing here is my unconditioned baseline, when I haven't practiced snare drum in a couple of weeks.
Something about those Remo pads makes me always revert to 80s power drummer mode. I don't play like that normally; it's a detriment to the playing I do on the drum set. My grip, with my index finger hanging off the stick, is roughly what Dom Famularo described (in a lesson with him ~1989) as a “power grip.”
First, notice the stroke types: full, down, tap, up. I'm more picky about these than most people. I do the strokes fast, especially the lift after the full stroke and the up stroke. Fast hand movement. You'll notice I don't lift the stick before the stroke— most people habitually lift the stick when attacking a note, even when the stick was already at the height you wanted for the next note. It's totally unnecessary, and it can't be accomplishing anything but slowing you down and making it harder to play the dynamics you want. I attack the note by directly moving the stick downward. No “here we go” lift motion. I've talked about this before.
With that full stroke I am not doing a “free”stroke, where you fling the stick at the head and catch it when it bounces back in your face. It's all wrist, my hand never opens up. My grip is controlled but light. The up stroke is also important— you have to pick up the stick. You get no assistance from surface bounce, if you're attempting some kind of Moellery/Famularo-y bounce technique. When practicing technique I always do that motion as fast as possible, regardless of the timing of the notes. The more practice you get doing a very fast lift, the more prepared you'll be for playing flam rudiments fast, and anything else requiring a fast upstroke, like a shuffle.
On the flams, notice that I don't lift the grace note— maybe very slightly, because my hands are not real conditioned at the moment— the stick is already in position after its downstroke in the previous flam, so any lift in the stroke only makes the grace note louder than I want it. Mastering this no-lift thing was the major thing that finally gave me real control over my dynamics.
I play the open roll slow-fast-slow, which I never do when practicing. I want to be practicing everything in time, so I'm against that in principle. I may start doing it just to see what happens, though. At the slow end I'm playing each double as two full strokes, all with the wrist. As we get into actual roll speed, there's a rebound happening, but I'm not changing my grip. I'm not opening up my hand or using fingers or anything. Just the motion and the natural flex of your hand creates those powerful doubles. At the fastest speed the doubles are getting a little crushed because my hands aren't conditioned and I'm a little tense, and my left hand seems to be slicing somewhat. Generally my stick heights are all over the place. That isn't really acceptable if you're trying to polish your technique, or are playing in a drum line, or whatever serious purpose. For day to day life as a jazz musician... whatever.
The Swiss triplets: I feel like I haven't practiced a Swiss triplet in five years, so I'm surprised they didn't fall apart at the faster end. I don't have a lot to say about them. They're possibly good conditioning for open rolls— they'll often turn into an open roll when you try to play them faster than you're able.
I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere, this controlled grip needs to be done carefully, so you don't stiffen up. Light grip, well articulated wrists— it's hard for a lot of people to actually move their wrist joint. Emphasis is on a fast motion, all strokes, quiet or loud, moving at the same speed. Dynamics come from stick heights, not force.
New rudiment time: a flam rudiment combining a Swiss Triplet and a Flamacue. It's so basic I can't imagine it doesn't already exist somewhere, but I'm not digging through the lists of 50,000 hybrid rudiments to check it out. They just started happening when I was hitting the practice pad, and I stopped to figure out what they were. We'll call them Swisscues, or Swiss Cues if you prefer— though calling it “Swiss [thing]” is misleading, because it's not a legit Swiss rudiment as far as I am aware.
...I wanted to call them “swissamacues”, just to make it extra-embarrassing to say. Decided against it.
Anyway here it is, with some exercises to develop it, plus a solo, adapted from Haskell Harr (Drum Method Book 2, p. 80, “Harold Pitcock”):
You can see from ex. 4 that we've simply doubled the right hand, and changed the rhythm to a sixtuplet. You can substitute these for regular flamacues found in Harr, or Wilcoxon, or the NARD collection. Have fun.
Oh, there's a little typo in measure 15 of the solo—the release of the roll on beat two should be a right hand, as it is throughout the rest of the solo. All of those rolls are 7-stroke rolls starting on the left hand, ending on the right, with a 16th note triplet pulsation.
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.
I mentioned to Adam Osmianski that I wanted a 6/8 version of his transcription of the found-music malfunctioning air conditioner drum solo, and he encouraged me to go ahead and do it myself, so here we are. It sounds really hip in 4/4 or in 6/8— it reminds me of Billy Higgins playing on Shimmy Shewobble, which I transcribed back in 2015. Sort of an Africanized march. These versions in 6/8 should be good for filling and soloing during an Afro 6 feel.
Tempo is about dotted-quarter note = 150. I've given two versions, one with the first note of the recording on beat 1, the other with the first note as an anticipation. The first one has a lot of successive measures leaning heavily on the middle subdivision— see the third and fourth lines on the first page; the second version has less of that. The second one will be a little easier for most people.
Just a little throwaway graphic illustrating the connectedness of flam rudiments. People think of them as “omg a bunch of different things”, but they use very similar motions.
The key rudiment here is the Flam Accent #1— you get the others after it by just doubling one note, and playing with the rhythm. The pattern named Unnamed Awesome Rudiment is now named Unnamed Awesome Rudiment, or UAR. I like it better than the other 16th note flam rudiments— Windmills are easy but dull, Flamadiddles are just loathsome. UARs are difficult but hip.
This is a small tweak on a common funk practice method for Ted Reed's Syncopation, adding flams to the method in which the right hand plays the book rhythm on a cymbal, and the left hand fills in. To me it's a 70s funk flavored thing, and brings this method a little closer to my Heavy Funk Drill, and my harmonic coordination-type methods.
For the examples we'll use line 7 of the well-known full page exercise on p. 38 in the new editions. As always with Reed, we're interpreting the top line rhythm, ignoring the bottom line rhythm.
The basic funk method we're using is: play the melody rhythm on the cymbal with your right hand, with bass drum in unison, fill in the 8th notes on the snare drum with the left hand. Which gives us this:
So, today's tweak: where there is more than one left hand note in a row, add a flam on the last one:
In the p. 38 exercise there is that situation where there is a quarter note followed by a quarter rest— that happens in the first, sixth, seventh, and eighth lines. When that happens you could alternatively put the flam on the middle left hand note— that will be on the 4 or on the 2. Another musical possibility.
I do the flams left-handed— that means the right hand plays the grace note, and falls first. Usually the grace note is only a little softer than the main note; I don't try to make them correct concert snare drum flams. The left handed flams convert easily to RH-lead 16th notes, with a small adjustment to the timing.
Way too many wordy posts recently, with more coming, so let's do a simple page of flam exercises in 6/8— in a triplet feel. Like p. 34 in Stick Control, but more robust. Whenever I play that page I am... unfulfilled... I want more. Left handed flam accents on the drums are a thing I do.
I'll practice this adding some extra accents, on the opposite hand of the flam— the left hand in exercise 4, for example. I suggest also playing these with the a duple pulse, in 3/4, so the rhythm for each measure becomes 1&2&3&.
This is pretty straightforward, almost something you can do without writing it out— I've simply transcribed the basic flam exercises from p. 16 of Stick Control into 5/8. I get bored practicing things in a straight march rhythm, and this gives them a little more interest.
I don't follow the instruction in the book about doing each exercise 20 times— if I was going to count repetitions I would do them for 4, 8, 12, 16, or 32 measures. But I just play them for 30 seconds to one minute.
Practice your flams. For some reason drumming-on-the-internet likes to ignore them, but they're important. Please do them. See my page of hand motions for Stone flam studies, or email me for a Skype lesson if you need help.
It's a funny thing, there's endless online conversation about how to play an open roll, and virtually nothing about flams. They're off the radar for some reason. And with the book Stick Control, NOBODY every talks about anything but page 1... scratch that, the first thirteen exercises on page 1. So let's get our stuff together, and get into the most miserable part of that book, the flam portion— pp. 16-23. As with the first part of the book, there are eighteen one- and two-beat exercises, which are then combined to make a total of 192 exercises. It's a real drag.
What I've done here is taken those first eighteen basic exercises and isolated the motion for each hand— the rhythm, the dynamics for the grace note, and any up or down strokes needed to make the dynamics happen. As you know, a flam is comprised of a main note, and a soft grace note that lands slightly before it. An up stroke is a soft note that ends with the stick in the raised position, and a down stroke is a normal-volume note that ends with the stick low— close to the head. Play 1-2" strokes for the grace notes, and 5-9" strokes for everything else. On the first exercise I've indicated a full stroke— a normal volume note that ends with the stick raised— for the lead hand part. You should actually play full strokes on all notes not indicated as a downstroke or upstroke. A lot of people habitually downstroke everything.
Play the parts for each hand in isolation. Initially I prefer to do the hand motions as fast as possible, rather than making them part of the rhythmic flow; so no matter how slow the tempo, you do a fast rebound or upstroke. See this post or get a Skype lesson with me (see the sidebar) for more technical guidelines.
As you do these faster, you have to streamline the hand motion, of course. But if you follow the dynamics rigorously at slow to moderate speeds, your normal-usage flams will improve dramatically, as will your accents, ghost notes, and dynamics in general.
In soloing I tend to lead with the left a lot, and play a lot of normally alternating flam rudiments in only left hand lead form— in the past I've shared a couple of different pages based on that. Here's another page of exercises developing a few different ideas a little further, using combinations of flam accents and flamacues, or things closely derived from them:
We've got some different time signatures here, but the idea is not just to use them in those meters. Instead, once you can play all the patterns, try incorporating them into a flow of 8th notes, 16th notes, or triplets in whatever meter you happen to be practicing. The goal here is not to set up a running cross rhythm, so you really only need to play them once or twice in a row in context— if you can do more repetitions without getting lost, go for it, it's just not the main point. You could also try starting the exercise idea on the 1 or 2, or on an &. Speed is also not particularly important.
Working out of Buster Bailey's snare drum book Wrist Twisters— one of the great books of technical snare drum studies, by the way— I came across a simple pattern I liked, and I wrote up some embellishments on it. The first pattern is the original, and the others are my variations:
Play each exercise many times as written, and with the stickings reversed. You can try to be strict about the written accents, or you may find yourself also accenting the added flams— it doesn't matter. It is nice having the control to not accent all the flams. I would also work the first exercise alone strictly for speed.
I thought I posted this weeks ago, but, if Blogger's kind-of sucky search engine is to be trusted, it seems I haven't. Best to find what you're looking for using the labels at the bottom of each post, and/or the site archives in the sidebar. One of these days I'll move the blog over to Wordpress, which I understand is a fairyland of things not sucking as bad as they do with Blogger...
Anyway, here's a snare drum workout in 6/8, using Stone stickings, and a mixed rhythm, with flams and a flamacue-like structure— an unaccented flam followed by an accent. No, I know of no more concise way of describing it.
I try to use as little ink as possible with these things, but this one is complex enough that we really need all the stickings written in, for both RH and LH lead. My usual rules these days are: 1) Play the dynamics. 2) Make it through the whole page every session. 3) Keep stick heights generally low— 1" grace notes, 3-4" taps, 5-6" accents.
Read the description of the previous variation for some technical notes on playing the fast, one handed, soft/loud sequence of notes, which happens a lot here.
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.
Lately I've been doing a lot with modulating between triplets and 16th notes, using similar stickings/coordination patterns. I've observed that it's a thing with Elvin Jones's drumming that he will play similar things in either a triplet or 16th note rhythm, or with a pull towards one rhythm or the other, and this is a way of working with that idea. These exercises are mostly based on patterns found in Stick Control; the stickings in each measure are almost the same as the other, except there has been one note added to make the 16th notes.
Also reverse the stickings, starting the patterns with the left hand. As a general rule, it's a good idea to play them twice as long left hand lead.
This is something that came organically out of my own playing- it came up again and again in improvising for years before I finally analyzed it. The only place I've seen it mentioned since is in the wadrumline.org list of 128 hybrid rudiments. As it says in the explanation, this is a hands-only pattern for me, and I play it at a pretty even volume- little or no accent on the flammed note, and the grace note is not particularly soft.
I've included a version with a bass drum substitution, though it basically turns it into a completely different lick.
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