Continuing the concept of that last thing, Fills in a 3/8 framework. Here we've got four 8ths of space to deal with, a cymbal accent, and three 8ths of fill. I'm very pleased with how this broad system is developing— I finally have a way of practicing fills, and teaching them— to all levels of students— that is systematic and realistic to how you actually play. It was always something you just had to figure out by playing a lot. None of the books on the subject made it for me.
This page may see some revision— my office is still blown to hell and I haven't been able to play through them. Some of the stickings are unusual, replace them with whatever more obvious thing you want. I'll probably add/change some stuff.
You know the routine, drill the individual things relentlessly for timing, movement around the drums, dynamics, and lastly speed, then play them in the practice phrases on p. 2. All of the phrases are limited to having three 8ths of fill, and that's pretty limiting— next we'll get into some phrases that are more realistic, and varied.
This came out of a mistake by a student, when we were working on some basic ghost note materials. Some things considered to be “advanced” come up naturally in the form of mistakes and general indiscipline. My student's timing was wrong for what was written on the page, but it was perfectly in time for this kind of techno beat— he mentioned Squarepusher, so that's what we'll call it.
Here are some things to play with, starting with the seed idea:
You can see sort of what's happening there— ordinary 16th note ghost note stuff, with some notes offset by a 32nd note, maybe doubled, and extended a little bit, with the goal of sounding hyper and disjointed.
Tempo and sound should be frenetic. Eventually. Crank your snare drum, or play them on one of those useless little 10" snares. Add bass drum as you see fit.
A page of groove fragments, really, for one of my students— to help get oriented working out of New Breed. We were having some difficulties with this particular cymbal rhythm.
You could play this page by itself, or use it to work out how the coordination will work when playing a similar system in New Breed.
Getting back into Gary Chaffee's linear materials a little bit— originally outlined in the Time Functioning volume of his Patterns series of books. Since first working on this system as a student, it has been a little problem fitting the patterns into a regular musical phrase. That's what we do here, write up solutions to things that kind of bugged me 35 years ago.
So here are some fill phrases in 4/4, beginning with a cymbal accent on 1, a double left on the e&, with the linear phrase beginning on the a of the beat. That's a natural entry.
We have a choice with these: on the phrases ending with two bass drum notes— which makes three in a row including the 1 of the repeat— you can play that as a single 8th notes. That will be more playable for more people.
Once you've learned a pattern repetitively, play it as a fill during a regular funk phrase, move your hands around the drums, and have a good time.
Yet another right hand lead Reed tweak— YART, or YARHLRT, for short. It's a little convoluted, but works out a slightly different thing from the other systems/tweaks we've done, and I think it's worthwhile.
The plain straight 8th right hand lead system involves playing the melody rhythm from Syncopation on a cymbal* with the right hand, with the bass drum in unison, while filling in the spaces with the left hand on the snare drum, to make a full measure of 8th notes.
* - You can also play the right hand on the toms, with no bass drum— most of my systems are written for the cym/BD way.
Here, where there are two or more melody notes in a row, we'll hit the cymbal on the first note only, with the bass drum playing the full melody rhythm. We'll also add some flams. Play these warmups to get a feel for the kind of movement that creates:
Taking it in steps, here is how the first three lines of p. 38 in Syncopation would be played, with cymbal on the first note of any run of bass drum notes:
Then add a flam right after each last unaccompanied bass drum note:
Before, we added a flam at the end of the runs of multiple lefts, and there are several spots where we can do that in this system:
Sight reading that gets a little silly, so you might just want to work out some one line exercises, and the p. 38 exercise. [UPDATE: Having played it a little more, it's not that bad, just do it.]
Here's Chester Thompson playing on the tune Gibraltar, an extended groove number on the Weather Report album Black Market. The first thing I ever transcribed was Chester Thompson playing with Genesis, and I associate him with the kind of vibe there— very clean, professional, and deliberate. Here he sounds looser.
This starts at 1:19, where the groove comes in— I bailed out just as he gets into a rather difficult to notate hihat groove— he's playing the hats while moving his foot a lot, resulting in a lot of irregular open sounds. Listen to the whole thing, it's pretty smoking by the end— and harder to separate the drums from the percussion to transcribe it.
His backbeats and accents on the snare drum are played very strong, as rim shots. His left foot is pretty consistently playing 8th notes, though they're not always sounding real clearly— I didn't notate them.
Here is a page of fill possibilities within this “beats to fills” framework, outlined at that link. Here the fill portions are two and four 8th notes long. I'll do a few more pages as necessary, to show what to do with one 8th/three 8th/other lengths of fills.
Briefly, it involves marking a written out rock beat so:
BD/cym notes = as written, played as crashes other notes = fill, played a number of ways we'll outline here
See the above link for illustrations and details.
I've long felt that one measure beat patterns— the conventional thing— is a very limiting way to learn. The approach here helps people read interpretively and creatively, and to not see a written out groove as an unchangeable, set thing. It's more like professional reading. And it's a really good framework for learning to play fills along with common ensemble accent figures.
Fill number 1 should be practiced several ways, just as an exercise:
• RH on cym / LH on snare • RH only • LH only • both hands in unison • alternating
Fill 2-8 are all connected, based on fairly small changes to fill 2. Fill 9 uses six stroke rolls, which combines the stickings from 7-8.
Fills 10-14 are various forms of alternating singles.
Fills 15-19 are miscellaneous unique fills, with tom ruffs, paradiddle inversions, and a linear pattern.
People should spend a good amount of time with each of these, trying out different moves around the drums, in addition to working on timing and sound.
Also play them in context as a two measure phrase, one measure written groove / one measure fill.
SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:I'm about to finish my out of town project that has been consuming a lot of my time, so hopefully we'll resume regular posting soon.
...aaaand I just got a Yamaha EAD 10, so we should be seeing some videos of me playing some of this stuff.
In the short term, I will continue to be desperate for things to post, so here's an item that is partly BS I wrote for my own amusement, hope you enjoy it:
BEAT DISPLACMENTis the newest hot item in drumming! Actually it has been a thing for a few decades, but it's now hip to be preoccupied with playing disruptively and inspiring amazement at the fluency with which you make people disoriented and unhappy.
Actually “displacement” was used very effectively by James Brown's drummers several decades ago, on songs like Cold Sweat, on which the drummer plays a couple of beats backwards during an otherwise normal two measure groove. It's a momentary, hip little rhythmic hiccup. We also get it with the partido alto rhythm, which has several downbeats in a row, followed by several offbeats. It's a normal part of rhythm in groove music, and somebody gave it a name.
Today* hip individuals seek a more sustained thing, in which you pull the rug out by displacing the full groove, holding it for awhile, letting listeners flounder around for their bearings, then pulling the rug out again when we displace it back to the now-forgotten original tempo! It's rugs all the way down. Building community through rhythmic agreement is cringe.
* - OK, that's an over 30 year old recording at the link there. That's a great record, I think maybe Mr. Baron was being a little too hip at that particular moment.
Yes, the rewards of sticking it to those losers who didn't practice the exact same rhythmic tricks you did are rich, let's talk about it.
Principles to consider
Seriously, playing in a way that gets people lost is not now good. Purely as a device, losing people for a moment before resolving together on the 1 is crassly satisfying for some listeners and players, but it is hack musicianship. You're like a comedian doing crowd work. You can use rhythm in a sophisticated way without just running stock gags.
First: with displacements and with polyrhythm, or polymetric ideas, not everybody is supposed to be doing the displaced rhythm. Somebody's got to be playing the original meter, the power of it is in the tension of the two things are happening together. You shouldn't match the other players playing the cross rhythm, and they shouldn't join you.
As rhythm section craft, and groove craft, you should play so people can hear the foundation tempo.
Example: here is a two measure phrase with a basic funk groove, displaced by one 8th note in the second measure, accented in the original 4/4 all the way through:
If you accent the downbeats of the displaced groove, you're doing this, in effect:
Several of you are thinking that's cool, that's what I want to do! No, you don't.
Look: the prize you win for losing everyone and crashing the band is you suck. Don't do that. Practicing drum materials about this kind of thing, do it so the original beat, and downbeat, is clear to you, and to the other players. The foundation groove is still the important thing, the integrity of the displacement is not important.
Of course if you're in a band dedicated to playing rhythm tricks on the audience, and all the musicians are in on what you're trying to do to them, you can do whatever you all can contrive and execute. Or more often, if you're playing with people who know you well, and are willing and able to deal with your unpleasant musical habits.
Principally this has been an opportunity for me to comment snidely on a suspect area of drumming. But there are things to be learned about rhythm by playing around with it. Creating community through rhythmic agreement is the real goal, and we're looking ways to do more with that.
Oh, here are a couple of pages of a basic funk groove, progressively displaced. Play it through a couple of times, and move on.
A similar item to another recent thing, with a Reed system I use pretty often, but don't talk about much— with the hands plaing the book rhythm, and the bass drum filling in the spaces. Hands lead / bass drum fills. I play this system with a (mostly) alternating sticking, you can also play the melody part with both hands in unison, or as flams, if both are on the same drum.
The tweak is to do a linear 16th note fill on the longer spaces in the melody rhythm— on the runs of two or more 8ths on the bass drum. Where there would normally be two 8ths on the bass drum, play BRLB (B = bass drum); where there would be three 8ths on the bass, play BRLRLB.
For each lettered example below, I give the basic way of playing it in this system, and how to play it with the linear fill:
Move your hands around the drums, of course. I never worked out a perfectly satisfactory sticking system for this method. I do it mostly alternating, with a bias for leading the multiples with the right hand. Always stick the 16th note fill the same way.
Work it up with the one line exercises in Syncopation pp. 30-31 and 34-37, then try the full page exercises starting on p. 38. Go for speed with this, you can do it fast.
Taking a moment to dispel a totally absurd impression of Steve Gadd that has somehow formed in recent years: that he is some kind of conservative “groove” player, which...
...no. He's extremely influential on the way drums are played now, and the epitome of what a modern player should be, actually— a great jazz drummer, and pop, funk, and fusion drummer, with an incredibly deep groove sense, and musical taste and creativity through the full range of expression possible on the drums. An incredible reader in the sense of handling arrangements creatively and excitingly, and sounding like pure foundation while doing that.
I don't like getting into superlatives. Just understand, he's the s***. As big a deal as anyone else you can name. It's our job to listen a lot, and figure out why.
Night Sprite, from Chick Corea's album Leprechaun, is the reason half the drum sets sold today include a 10" tom tom— it inspired a whole generation of fusion players to use them. Or Gadd generally did, and this is the track of his that features it most spectacularly.
It's also an essay on why the RLLR-LRRL paradiddle inversion is awesome.
...I don't mention those mundane things because they're the main things that are great about the record. I mention them because they're the only things you can say. The music itself is the explanation of how great it is, there's nothing you can say about it that isn't banal technical point.
Three Quartets is another huge Chick Corea record— basically a jazz record, but they've brought in some fusion elements, and we've become unused to hearing this deep, fat, fusion-like drum sound in a straight jazz setting. Note that we hear lots of cymbal/bass drum unisons throughout this— all the right hand lead stuff we do leads into this kind of thing. All of that Reed stuff.
There's a lot with both hands in unison as well, on the snare drum and cymbal. And he does some exciting things with the cymbals alone, unsupported by the snare or bass— how he begins the piano solo, for example, after 1:10:
Slamming here, with an extended drum/percussion feature, playing live with saxophonist Tom Scott. It's easy to think of all of modern studio funk/fusion playing— that universal anonymous style— as basically people doing Steve Gadd, but through all of this listening we can hear different things happening, that the generations of influencees did not pick up on. The unisons between the snare drum and bass drum, for example.
Another mundane technical note, this track has been famous with me for a long time for having the pataflafla-ed 6 stroke rolls— pataflaflas with doubles in the middle. At about 6:35.
Silly Putty, the first thing in the video below, is not so well known now, but it's one of those era-defining tracks, like Herbie Hancock's Chameleon, or Palm Grease. There was a thing of inventing creative linear funk grooves on the drums at that time. I don't know if Gadd started it, but he certainly led it— you're aware of his famous 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover groove.
Cool instrumentation there, a quartet (guitar, keyboards) doing the playing, plus nine horns hitting the arranged stuff. Note to self, hire the extra guys. If you listen to that record all the way through, that's Lenny White on the third tune, the rest of it is Gadd.
Those are all pretty showy recordings, he is of course on a thousand other records. Maybe literally. You can look up more stuff from the 70s/early 80s especially. Do.
Here's a cool video of Ndugu Leon Chancler in the studio with George Duke, playing Dukey Stick, which ended up on his record Don't Let Go. They start playing after about 1:45. The way Ndugu counts it in is hilarious:
That's Napoleon Murphy Brock, best known from Zappa's band, doing background vocals here, and Sheila E. (Escovedo at the time) on percussion. The guitarist (“Goin' surfin baby!”) is Charles Johnson who much later became a well known blogger, writing the Little Green Footballs blog— which was very pro Iraq war during the Bush years, and has since become much more politically liberal.
Funk ain’t easy. Many ASSUME that it is. Swing is complex, but it doesn’t grant carte blanche over other styles. Every idiom has its nuances that demand respect & attention to detail. If the particular Feel isn’t gotten with RESPECT ? Not gonna happen.
Here are some more practice phrase ideas for the tom ruffs. This is an underrated item, it should be a lot of fun. Rock out.
As the stickings on patterns 1 and 2 indicate, when there are two cymbal hits in a row, you can play them with alternating hands, on different cymbals. I've put in a Keith Moon-like thing with both hands in unison on the tom toms, with bass drum, on some of these— you can play those notes also just as solo bass drum.
Here's a page for my students, working through the basics of a half time funk shuffle groove. It gets mentioned a lot more online than it comes up in real life, but it's a thing.
There are a number of ways to write it; I've put it in 6/8 and 12/8. In real life I might expect it to come up most often as a sixtuplet feel in 4/4.
Pay careful attention to the dynamics on the snare drum; play the accent strongly and ghost the other notes. I also accent the downbeats of the cymbal rhythm, you can do that if you choose.
Fun item inspired by watching some Bob Newhart Show reruns— I watched it a lot as a kid, and the drumming on the theme music made an impression well before I started playing.
In the fourth season they did a funkier arrangement of the theme song, that had a cool fill at the end, with a ruff on the tom toms, ending on the bass drum. They used the toms differently then, and very effectively:
I say “they” used the toms differently, maybe it's just John Guerin, the drummer here. Any time I hear a lot of concert toms on some 70s movie or TV music, he's my first guess. There's a real school of using the tom toms there. Somebody should write a paper. Thanks to David Crigger for sharing that credit.
It was a hip item at the time, and one of the first licks I tried to figure out on the drums. Now it seems a little dated, and ripe for revival.
Play the warm ups, then work it out with Reed, as a variation on the right hand lead system. You fit the ruffs into any quarter note (or longer) length space in the book rhythm— where there are two or more filler notes. On the three 8th note long spaces, play the first filler note normally, then the ruff on the last two— that's illustrated with warmups 4 and 5. Notice also the added flams there, which you can do after getting the system together. They sound cool.
Incrementalism is the word du jour around here— lately we've been all about supplementing/altering some basic Reed systems in small ways, to make a living, evolving thing out of it, and not just pure formula.
Today's thing introduces some alternating stickings to a rock drill I wrote about in 2019:
• Book rhythm = cymbal (with RH) + bass drum in unison • Fill spaces with left handed flams, or double stops, on drums
Here's the second line of Exercise 1 on p. 38 in Syncopation, played that way— for clarity, I put the filler notes as double stops, and given the sticking for the cymbal part only:
For today's thing, we'll alternate the cymbal part when there are two or more notes in a row— always starting with the right hand. Single cymbal notes are always played with the right:
We want to maintain it as primarily a right hand lead system— with left handed flams (rL), when flamming— because that gives you some options on the filler:
Whatever you can do with one-three 8th notes worth of space, starting and ending with the right hand:
If you're one of those “weaker hand” guys, you could always learn the baseline system so the left hand is doing all the cymbal hits, and then do all these same variations.
Here's a lot of ink for you, for eight measures. Mickey Roker playing a funk groove with a lot of detail to it, on Goin' Down South, a Joe Sample tune from Bobby Hutcherson's record San Francisco. The transcription starts at the beginning of the track:
The hihat, snare drum and bass drum are pretty layered here, there's no master plan of simplified coordination underlying it, of the type I'm always pushing. Like he doesn't avoid unisons between the SD and BD. I don't know how much he worked out his funk stuff. I've been listening to Roker playing some absurdly fast tempos with Dizzy Gillespie— to me this sounds like independence inherited from his jazz drumming. Everything about him sounds like it evolved through constant playing, on the gig.
Point of notation: as I often do, I'm using a tenuto mark to indicate a half-open, sizzling hihat. I like it, it makes sense, and I think we should use standard articulations as much as possible.
This is the first four measures of the track— by the third measure he settles on the main groove he'll be repeating throughout this section of the song.
People try to groove like this by hitting the drums harder, and it doesn't work, it just sounds harsh. He's not playing loud, but he's getting a deep sound, a great sound out of the snare drum.
Hihats are played all with the right hand, accenting on the 8th notes. There's some interesting texture happening on the snare drum with the ghost notes, including a 32nd note triplet at the end of the measure.
On the recording you can hear what sounds like concert toms occasionally— they conflict with the ghost notes on the snare drum, so they're either played by somebody else, or they're overdubbed, or another instrument is doing something that reads like concert toms to my ear. I wrote that out so you can emulate that if you want.
Very minor little item. The RLB pattern is extremely useful in fills, and as part of a linear groove, and it's a good idea to be able to end it on 1, no matter where in the measure you start it— no matter how it ends up being inverted at the end of the measure.
I played around with this yesterday, playing the pattern as a 16th note fill, starting on each 8th note of the measure. I was doing it in double time, along with my Watermelon Man loop. What happened was, I ended it one of three ways:
For the example I put the R hand on the cymbal, but the idea is to move both hands around the drums. You can extend this over 1, 2, or 4 measures. I shifted it by one 8th note, but you could also shift it by 16th notes, starting the fill on the es and as. You'll know when you've taken that far enough.
At some point, hopefully, you will be grounded enough with this pattern that you'll know on the fly how to get out of it, without planning or remembering which beat you started it on.
Buddy Rich drum solo on Big Mac, a prodigious funk/rock arrangement by Ernie Wilkins, from Rich's album Ease On Down The Road— it's actually better known from Roar of '74, but I have it on EODTR. I'm not particularly a lover of Buddy Rich's playing, but my God.
Ever feel like basically all instrumentalists— and arrangers— have forgotten that this kind of energy is a thing? Everybody's moving sideways, fussing around in the fine subdivisions. I'm complaining about the young, people in their 60s definitely haven't forgotten.
Tempo is 93, the solo begins at 3:49.
It's Buddy, so lots of rim shots, he's extremely aggressive with his accents. We hear more unisons between the snare drum and bass drum than perhaps with other drummers. It's a powerful sound but kind of crude. His rock thing doesn't sound fully formed, but he's certainly bringing the energy. Who needs fully formed.
I would expect him to be doing a lot of paradiddles, but here I believe the stickings on the denser stuff are mostly singles. He seems to be playing some very thin little hihats, and mostly hanging out on a very bright 70s 20" A. Zildjian. Tom toms sound good, classic rockin' late 60s/early 70s sound. Very little left foot activity that I can hear.
Style note for you transcribers: when there's a lot of double time— 32nd notes and sixtuplets— it's best to create a little imaginary beat separation between the downbeat cluster of notes and the &-of-the-beat cluster of notes, connecting them with a single beam, as I've done here.
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