Rock with Stick Control!

A little thing I improvised while warming up for a rehearsal.  All my rock stuff is oriented around getting off the hihat, getting both hands moving around the drums. A lot of students get locked into that crossed over hihat playing orientation. 

We're playing Stick Control patterns on the cymbals and snare drum, and adding bass drum rhythms from another source. Circled notes are played on the snare drum, other notes are played on the cymbals— R on a right side cymbal, L on a left side one:

The bass drum rhythm can be gotten from any normal rock book, like Funky Primer, or Joel Rothman's books. I use Syncopation, playing p. 38 top to bottom using each sticking, with the bass drum playing the melody rhythm (except I usually omit the bass drum notes on 2/4). I might also accent the cymbal hits that are in unison with the bass drum. 

I would want a student to pretty experienced and comfortable with ordinary materials before messing with this, like after they can to play Syncopation p. 38 all the way through with a basic rock feel.   

Fully worked out, this could look really overchoreographed and stupid, like bad YouTuber stuff. The point is to do it enough to open things up, to have some freer movement. 

See my rock drill, and beats to fills pages, and my wrong stickings game for more like this. 

Beats to fills

Here's a connecter idea, using some rock beats written normally, a la Funky Primer, but playing them as cymbal accents with fills, as in this rock fill drill— hitting accents on the cymbal/bass drum, and filling in 8th notes on the snare and toms. 

That latter thing has been a regular part of my teaching for several years, usually starting with the 8th note accent pages in Syncopation. Those pages are a little dull though. This way will be better because a) the rhythms are more interesting, and b) it will give students some ideas about where to take an ordinary written-out rock beat. 

It's quite simple. For example, with beat number 4 from p. 13 of Funky Primer: 

You hit the bass drum/cymbal notes as crashes, supported with the bass drum, and hit the rest of the 8th notes on... some drums. Snare or toms, TBD later: 
 

With beat number 8: 

You would play: 

As exercises, you'd play those fill measures some different ways: 

1. Right hand only 
2. Left hand only
3. Both hands in unison- two cymbals, two drums (or flams on one drum)
4. Right hand on cymbal / left hand on drums
5. Right hand on cymbal / both hands on drums

And the drum part could be played:

1. On the snare drum.
2. Moving around the drums in a set pattern you make up. 
3. Moving around the drums freely.. 

Here's how you could play those in a two measure phrase— one measure of the written beat, one measure accents/fills:

Students get way too hung up on what cymbal or drum they should hit— in the second measure you can take the snare line to mean any drum, and the cymbal part to mean any cymbal. Keep it simple until you can play it, then get creative. You can follow sticking systems 1-5 above at first, then wing it. 

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.   

Get the pdf

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. 

Get the pdf

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. 

Marvin Dahlgren video channel

Everybody's going to want to check this out: Marv's Legacy, a new(ish?) YouTube video channel with Marvin Dahlgren talking about practicing his books— Four Way Coordination, Accent On Accents, Drum Set Control, etc.  

I've only just started viewing them, but this video seems to be a straightforward explanation of the methods presented in the book. I'm looking forward to getting deeper into the videos and seeing what insights he offers based on several decades worth of actually teaching the materials. So far he sticks pretty close to the text. 

It's nice to know what the authors were thinking. But there are other ways of doing things— obviously I also have my own ideas on how to use the book. 

Speaking of Dahlgren's legacy, I'm not sure of the status of a number of his books published by Really Good Music— a small firm run by the father of pianist Geoff Keezer, Ron Keezer, who passed away during COVID. They sold photocopy printouts of about ten books of his that I've never seen anywhere else. Last I checked the site was down. Sheetmusicplus is showing titles published by Really Good Music LLC, but none of the special Dahlgren titles yet. 

[h/t to stevil @ DFO]

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. 

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. 

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.   

Get the pdf

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 voice / four note patterns

Continuing in the vein of the recent three voice/three note patterns item. Let's call this series “things I have always been against writing that I am now writing.” I've been playing around with an online combination generator, making some Stick Control-type patterns for the drum set, including combinations of limbs. I'm trying to do it in a rational way; it would be easy to produce an insane collection of patterns that would be totally unusable.

This is a practice-able collection of four-note patterns, written for three drum set voices, including single notes and RH-LH and RH-RF unisons. It adheres to my usual rules for what makes something very playable: no more than two SD or BD hits in a row, and no more than three cymbal hits. It's similar to things found in Dahlgren & Fine, and Chaffee, but different.

So: what is this good for, and how do we practice it?

1. There are 120 patterns, so you have to move as quickly as possible. Try to cover all of the patterns in 15-30 minutes.

2. Use to develop an ECM-type texture, or as conditioning for breaking up a normal funk texture. Could also be played with a swing feel, addressing some possible coordination/timing gaps.

3. The patterns are written as 8th notes in 2/4, but you can play them on a four note or three note subdivision, as 16th notes or triplets. Doing them as triplets, it helps to know how the cymbal portion of the pattern lies in 4/4— a separate cheat sheet for that is coming soon...

4. Try these moves:

• Play the written cymbal/snare unisons as snare/tom unisons, or as flams on any drum— I suggest doing them left-handed, meaning the right hand lands first.
• Play cymbal/bass drum unisons on a different cymbal than the plain RH cymbal notes.

Doing those moves makes this very similar to what I do with my harmonic coordination improved system, except with more potential for speed.

5. Add hihat in unison with the left hand only notes, or the right hand only notes, or the bass drum only notes. Or add hihat in any basic rhythm suitable for the style you're playing.

5. Combine patterns from different sections to make linear funk grooves. Play patterns starting with a bass drum first, and patterns starting with a snare drum second. I arranged them on the page to make that fairly easy— sections A and B combine well, and C and D combine well. You can also do A/D and C/B. Section E could come first or second. That creates a vast number of combinations, which... there may be better ways of working on that sort of thing. I'm not a proponent of endless systems. But it's a possibility.

Get the pdf

Heavy funk drill

Going from Ndugu-actual to Ndugu-esque. This is a 70s style funk drill that dovetails nicely with some other things we've been doing lately— see the other links in that linked post. I think jazz drummers tend to plant our right hand on the ride cymbal— I do, at least. This batch of methods are (partly) about getting the hands moving between the drums and cymbal confidently while maintaining a strong groove. The move we're doing here with the flams reminds me of things I've heard Ndugu Leon Chancler do with George Duke, or Greg Errico with Betty Davis, for example.

We'll use Syncopation by Ted Reed, as always. This is marginally more complicated than the easiest things we do with that book. For the examples I'll use the rhythm from line 20, p. 35:

Play the melody rhythm from the book on the bass drum, and fill in the gaps with flams on the snare drum (or unisons, if playing the hands on two different drums). I play all the flams left handed, with pretty strong grace notes.

Add cymbal, with the right hand, on the long notes— anything in the original rhythm longer than an untied 8th note:

That's it! Move the flams around the drums. Where there is a run of flams, you can play them all on one drum, or split them up. You could play the flams as double stops on two different drums; this drill is kind of a specific effect, so I mostly keep both hands on the same drum.

You could warm up by leaving out the snare drum filler:

Or by putting the cymbal on all the bass drum notes:

Or by not doing the flams, or whatever else. Those are all fine easy practice methods in their own right. When I play this I'm all over the place. The idea is to create a texture, not necessarily to do the thing endlessly. I can't tell you if you'll be a better drummer if you rigorously do the method exactly right in its entirety, or if you just get the basic idea and spend your time developing a musical texture with it.

Here is the first line of the well-known p. 38 exercise, with the complete interpretation. If you're wondering how to handle the longer runs of 8th notes, see the end of measure 3 into measure 4:

I like the practice rhythms with no more than two 8ths worth of notes/space in a row best— lines 1-3, 6-7, 11-12, 20, 24, 27, 30, 32, 35-36, 45-48 from pp. 34-37. I prefer this full page exercise to the ones in Reed for this purpose. Try this with the Betty Davis practice loop. It's a lot of fun.

Three notes, one on cymbals - 01

This little assignment is related to several things we've done lately: my harmonic coordination improved method, and my rock drill; playing it in */4 meters with a swing feel gives you something similar to rubadub. It's all the same thing, more or less: facilitating moving around the drums in an even rhythm, using the whole instrument and all the limbs. Each thing just has a slightly different focus.

I suggest moving the non-cymbal notes around the drums somewhat systematically, playing each two drum notes in a row on the same drum, or splitting them between drums:

The stickings on the flams are meant to support conversion to alternating singles— so the flams before a RH cymbal hit will start with the right hand, for example.

You can also play the flams as straight unisons— called double stops— when playing each hand on different drums.

You can practice the patterns in a triplet feel as written, and also in 3/4, or 4/4 (or 2/2)— with straight 8ths or a swing feel:

When playing in 4/4, just play the first set of patterns— as you can see the converted versions of sets B and C occur naturally in the second and third measure.

This is the sort of thing I really need to play along with a sampled loop. I can't just run patterns dry.

Get the pdf

Rock drill

Here's a rock drumming practice system, that is related to my harmonic coordination improved method, and also this post on developing rock fills. I've been using it with students of all ages, and have been doing it myself for getting in the zone for a rock recording session later in the week.

I'm finding it to be an extremely effective method for learning rock as an open texture, moving around the drums and using the whole instrument. The way people learn rock drumming is typically centered around learning beats, learning “parts” to songs, and learning fills. It's all very segregated, and way too nailed down, so I see a lot of students who are afraid to move off of the hihat, afraid to deviate from learned parts, and prone to panicking when attempting fills. This method gets us into a freer, more Keith Moon-like approach, with a driving 8th note pulse.

We'll be playing two kinds of notes in this system:

Cymbal and bass drum in unison. Any cymbal(s), played with either hand, or both hands.

Snare and toms in unison. Any two drums played at the same time, or flams on any one drum. Using both hands obviously.

You can get your practice patterns from several sources:

Using the accented 8th note exercises in Syncopation on pp.47-49. Play the written accents on a cymbal + bass drum, play unaccented notes on the snare/toms. As always, ignore the stems-down bass drum part written in the book.

Using any page of 8th note and quarter note rhythms in Syncopation, e.g. pp. 10-11, 30-32, or 34-45. Play the book rhythm on the cymbal + bass drum, and fill in the spaces in the rhythm on the snare/toms, to make a constant 8th note rhythm:

I also use my special page of 3/4 rhythms, while playing with a practice loop in 4/4.

Using the first pages of Stick Control. Play R notes on cymbal + bass drum, play L notes on the snare/toms:

Since both hands are playing the drums portion, the only sticking decision we have to make is which hand to use on the cymbals. Start by playing them all with the right hand; then all with the left hand:

Then play the cymbal notes both hands in unison, on two different cymbals:

You could also alternate hands on the cymbal notes:

Having your cymbal moves too worked-out looks contrived, goofy— see YouTube “drum cover” star Cobus whatshisface and others like him for endless examples of that. You don't need to work it to death. There are other things to think about than am I able to follow a difficult sticking system on the cymbal portion.

Every drum and combination of drums you play has a specific effect. Spend some time exploring the possibilities moving around the toms, and figure out what sounds cool to you. With only two tom toms, the moves are kind of limited when you have your hands on two different drums. There's more room to experiment when you're playing both hands on the same drum, as flams. For example:

When doing the flams, do them rock & roll style, with both hands at roughly an even volume. I suggest playing them all left-handed— meaning the right hand falls first:

 Then you can turn them into 16th notes just by displacing the left hand a little bit. The entire time you've been doing this system, you've been practicing getting your 16th note fills in time.

The idea here is to cover a lot of easy patterns, that are easy to move around the drums and cymbals, focusing on the timing, the sound, and the energy. I think you should do these with a practice loop or song, alternating measures (or several measures, or partial measures) of the drill with whatever rock beat you like for the song. No pressure at all to make the changes on the 1, or to follow a repetitive practice phrase exactly. Scroll through my practice loops and see if you can find one that is a good tempo and feel for you.