3/16 Control - 02

A very dense page today, but it's not for you, it's for me. I was practicing the original 3/16 Control pages along with my Watermelon Man loop, and thought some of the permutations would be better written down. 

You should just play the ink and not worry about it, but here's what's happening there: 

Instructions 1 and 2:
Play the 3/4 patterns, starting on each note of the pattern (unnecessary if you're playing them along with a loop in 4/4, as I was). 

Play each two beats of the pattern together in 2/4: beats 1-2, 2-3, 3-1. 


Instruction 3, written permutations in 4/4:
First line:  Play 3/4 pattern starting on each beat of the pattern, adding the starting beat at the end to make a measure of 4/4. I cut off the last 16th note of the measure because it sounded good. 

Second line: Starting on each beat of the 3/4 pattern, play the beats of the pattern in this order:

1st beat / 2nd beat / 1st beat / 3rd beat

That seems weird/artificial, but isn't. 

Bonus item: the patterns in 3/4 with a Tony Williams-like open hihat thing: 

I think I was doing the 4/4 exercises in a phrase of three measures of the pattern, plus one measure improvised fill. And of course improvising fills whenever I would make a mistake.  

I should probably say what I was doing this for— the individual three-note patterns here are all very ordinary modern drumming vocabulary. This page is a drill for doing it in a non-formulaic way. Some people practice out of Stick Control decade after decade, I do things like this. 

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Converting 3/8 hemiola patterns to 2/4

That's it, CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! is now an all what-I'm-teaching-in-lessons web site. I'm preoccupied with other stuff right now, travel plans and whatnot. 

I started doing this around 2013, and quite a bit lately— changing time signatures of practice materials by repeating beats in the written part. Here, I'm using the hemiola patterns in 3/8 page with a couple of students, which we can expand into a pretty comprehensive basic funk vocabulary for a regular 4/4 environment by just repeating some notes. 

We're putting the 3/8 patterns into 2/4 time by repeating the last 8th note (or first two 16ths) in the measure; or by repeating the first 8th/two 16ths; or by adding the first 8th note/two 16ths in the measure to the end:

We're teaching people that patterns are portable, and about working with patterns without having to see them written out, and about generally being not too boxed in by time signatures.  

I do this only with students who can do it easily— to some people, at some stages of development, it will be confusing, and possibly undermining. There's no need press them to get it if it doesn't immediately make sense to them. 

While we're moving things around, many of the resulting patterns will work better as funk vocabulary if you reverse the beats, starting them on beat 2. For example: 

Try that if the pattern has snare drum on the first note. If that results in a pattern with no bass drum on the first note— like with the last pattern on the fourth line on the page— I'll often have students add bass drum on that note.  

Get the pdf, if you need it. 

Hemiola funk patterns in 5/8

Here's a nice easy page of hemiola funk patterns in 5/8— based on our friend the 3:2 polyrhythm. World's fastest way of getting your students playing hip stuff in 5, if you already (wisely) ran them through my previous hemiola funk pages. 

These will also work in a bright 5/4— 8th notes = quarter notes, in that case. You can also swing the 16ths, add hihat (on 2 and 5) and alter the cymbal rhythm (add skip notes on 2 and 5) to make a 5/4 jazz feel, which is an excellent idea.

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Hemiola funk series: all basic patterns in 3/8

UPDATE: Download link works now!

There's an ongoing political crisis happening in the United States right now, and it's really hard to write, or do anything else productive. It's very serious and basically every human on the planet should be very concerned about it, because it does affect everyone. 

So here is what I can manage— kicking around the hemiola funk concept some more. For me this is background work for a book; for you it could be a Stick Control-like thing, and play the patterns by themselves, and in all of their combinations. They're easy, so even though there are a lot of combinations, it should go quickly. There will be many duplicates of things on the other page of this from last week. I can't help you there. 

I've only included proper hemiola patterns that have running 8th notes in the right hand— none of the linear RLB patterns I wrote about before, which are closely related, but really a different thing. Play the patterns in the 3/4 rhythms at the bottom of the page, or just play them in 6/8 or 12/8. After playing them individually, combine them like: 

1-2, 1-3, 1-4... 1-26
2-3, 2-4, 2-5... 2-26
3-4, 3-5, 3-6... 3-26

By the time you get to 25, you'll just play 25-26 and be done. 

Playing them in 6/8, you could also try playing patterns starting with a bass drum on 1, with patterns starting with the snare drum on 2. So you might play:

2-1, 2-3, 2-5, 2-7...
4-1, 4-3, 4-5, 4-7...
6-1, 6-3, 6-5, 6-7...

All the combinations with BD on 1, SD on 2, going up and down the page. Enjoy. 

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Hemiola funk series: all patterns combined

Continuing to work through the possibilities of the hemiola funk series, in hopes of eventually making a concise, coherent method out of it. It has been great for my students— adult beginners, and kids under 10, even. It's fun, and easy, and sounds and feels cool, and it teaches real fundamental drum set coordination.  

This is three pages long, with a lot of patterns... and just now I see I've left out one. Oh well. It's really a Stick Control-type library of combinations— a student would have to have a really good grasp of the larger picture for me to teach this in a lesson.  
 

Lines 1-10 are the basic patterns, one time, and repeating in 3/4. Pages 2-3 show all the patterns combined in a single measure of 3/4. I've only written them in one order. 

Really each of the combinations deserves the full page treatment I did with each of the basic patterns— inverting them so the 1 is on each beat of the measure, playing each two beats of the pattern in 2/4, and in 2/4 with the beats reversed, and extending the the 3/4 pattern into one measure of 4/4. 

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Hemiola funk series: S3B

Another variation on the hemiola funk thing, with the main pattern ending with a double on the bass drum— a snare hit + 3 bass hits. I continue to tweak the basic template to cover the major rhythmic possibilities, with some practical variations, while still being playable for younger students. I have a couple of students under age 10 who are sounding great with these materials.

Ex. 1 is simply the hard part of the pattern isolated— play it a few times with a long pause after, to get the coordination. The main potential problem with this system is if students play the ideas by feel and accidentally lapse into 3/4 when they're supposed to be playing in 4. I have the students count the overall rhythm of the patterns before playing them, and this has not been a problem— my students can improvise variations on these ideas without getting lost.

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Hemiola funk series: Funky Primer - p. 22

Here's an easy little thing, bringing together two funk items: I've taken a familiar page from Charles Dowd's Funky Primer, and re-written it with the patterns used in my hemiola funk series.

You know what to do with a page of beats. The numbering is different than in the original book. I couldn't be bothered to match them up. One beat from the original page is missing because it didn't work with the HFS patterns; instead I added a variation on the previous beat.

UPDATE: Here's how I work this with my students— lay this page over the book so corresponding beats from each column can be played together:

The numbers are different, so that's a little bit of a pain. Beat 5 from Funky Primer has no corresponding variation on my page.

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3+3+2

I'm really not happy with the quality of the available beginner/younger student drum set materials. For the most part they're terribly designed. They're either extremely dull, or they demand too much, or they're just dumb— see Drumeo's materials, where they think being a beginner means your eyesight is failing, so they spread a single measure of a rock beat across a full page. My hemiola funk series is beating the hell out of everything else I have encountered and used, in terms of being engaging, and easy and fun to play, while teaching students basic drumming coordination... and learning a rhythmic conception that is actually quite sophisticated.

I wrote this for several younger students who are working on that series. These are some easy ways of playing a very common rock figure, that happens to the same as the familiar tresillo rhythm. These are meant for playing and filling that rhythm as an ensemble figure, rather than as a repeating groove. Here I've written as an “additive rhythm”— as 3+3+2/8, rather than as it is normally notated, as a syncopated rhythm.

The rhythm here is regular 8th notes and 16th notes— there are no triplets. Don't be confused by the beaming. With students I count this 123-123-12. I don't have them count the 16th notes, or count while they play.

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EZ Hemiola Funk beats with RLB

Just an easy page of hemiola funk-type beats including the RLB pattern as a fill, that I wrote for my students, who have been having a lot of fun with this series.

Write in the stickings if necessary. I usually have my students count the rhythm before playing a pattern. On the fill portion, with the RLB pattern, start by playing just the snare drum and high tom, then move the right hand to other drums, then move both hands around the drums— either both on the same drum, or on different drums.

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Hemiola funk series: easy grooves in 4/4

A page of easy beats based on the hemiola funk thing, that I wrote for my students. I'm trying to stay close to the original basic licks, while changing them slightly to fit them into a normal rock or funk context. I have two major goals with this project: to understand how the 3:2 polyrhythm influences normal drumming voculary, and to develop a drumming method based on it. I also want my students to have a healthy undertanding of that polyrhythm— I see it as a sort of clave.

We initially learn the basic hemiola funk patterns repeating in 3/8 or 3/4, and it's easy to fall back into those meters without thinking, so putting the pattern in 4/4 requires some awareness to not get lost. Internalizing the combined rhythm for each groove helps with that— do that by counting it out loud before you play. 1e&a-2&-3e&-4& for number 9, for example.

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RLB intro page

This is based on a page I wrote in 2012— I was using that with a younger student, and marked it up so heavily that it was unreadable. So here's a clean version of what we were doing with it. We've got the RLB linear pattern played 1-3 times, in some rhythmic variations/inversions, to help get the coordination, and to learn to not just see the pattern one way. It also ties in somewhat with the hemiola funk pages, which I was using with this same student.

Play the right hand on the hihat or on a tom tom. Play the left hand on the snare drum or a tom tom. Then move them around. Play the patterns repeating, as indicated; also play them one time, fast, with a long pause after— mainly 2-16, and 20-22.

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Hemiola funk series: SS-BB / BB-SS

Another permutation on this basic hemiola funk format I've devised, doubling up on the BS, forwards and backwards... wait. I'm deliberately not really giving you a finished concept here— I just wrote this up to see how it played out. It seems like an obvious idea, but it actually doesn't convert into normal funk vocabulary as well as some of the other pages. I'm not hearing it.

If you've been working with my previous pages, there's no reason not to play through this at least one time. The whole point is that none of this is technically difficult, and just because something doesn't really work for me, doesn't you won't get anything out of it. This will be my next publishing project after I finish with the 2019 Book of the Blog, which should be available for purchase next week.   

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Hemiola funk series: back to back

Continuing this project to see how much standard funk vocabulary can be derived from two 3:2 polyrhythm licks. Here we're doing the two main BS-BS and SB-SB hemiola licks back to back, and putting that in 2/4 and 4/4 in various permutations. 

Patterns 1-4 summarize the basic licks found on the HFS beginner sheet. The main forms of this back to back thing are in patterns 5, 6, and 17. The patterns in 2/4 and 4/4 are created by adding or subtracting beats from the main patterns in 3/4. Some of the 2/4 patterns make more sense as funk vocabulary if they are played with the beats reversed, as I've written in patterns 9 and 11.

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Hemiola funk - doubles - beginner sheet

Getting into doubles with my hemiola funk series— two notes in a row at 16th note speed on the same drum/cymbal. Using the same format as the last beginner sheet, which I've found to be effective with my younger students.

Patterns 13 and 14 are the essential idea we're developing; patterns 1-12 isolate the elements, and begin playing them in sequence. Patterns 15-28 put the idea in 2/4 (with inversions) and 4/4, and re-orchestrate it slightly. 

Play patterns 1-12 several times, with an unmetered rest in between repetitions— play it once, take a breath, and play it again. Play patterns 13-28 one time as with 1-12, then play them repeating.

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Hemiola funk series - beginner sheet

Continuing to develop a method for this hemiola funk idea. Please forgive the repetition— when this is a finished method, I'll release it as an e-book. In the mean time, I'll be posting a lot of things not very dissimilar from previous pages. This is a page I wrote to use with a couple of my younger students.

Exercises 1-16 are for clarity about the basic coordination. Teaching this page, I have the student play them one time and stop, and ask them to play it again as necessary. Patterns 5-16 can be played repeating in time if you choose. Play exercises 17-28 one time, stopping on beat 1 of the repeat; then play them repeating.

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Hemiola funk series: 2/4 inversions

I wrote this out for some of my younger students, and also as a continued exploration of this hemiola rhythm in funk. It's very similar to some other things I've posted— most of these left hand rhythms already occur in this page of tresillo inversions— so you'll have to forgive the redundancy. It's an idea in development. And different levels of students need to see things written out certain ways.

I've written out a 3:2 polyrhythm in 8ths and 16ths, played twice in a single measure of 3/4, written three ways. Then I extracted the first two beats of each 3/4 rhythm, and wrote out inversions of it, starting on each 8th note of the rhythm. You can see that the results are mostly very common funk snare drum or bass drum rhythms.

I've given a sticking for each pattern: R = right hand, L = left hand, B = both hands. I find it's helpful for students to count the rhythm, and to think of the patterns as a sticking. Also play the patterns substituting the bass drum for the left hand. A couple of obvious moves for turning these into performance vocabulary are to add a snare drum back beat on 2 (if it's not already present), or add a bass drum on 1— or on any cymbal note without a unison.

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Hemiola funk - repeated beats

More of this hemiola funk idea, putting the two basic 3/4 patterns into 4/4 by repeating each beat of the pattern... starting on each beat of the pattern. I don't know if there's a special need for anyone to play through all of these posts; I'm just developing an idea live on the site, running it through some logical permutations and seeing what I get. A lot of it ends up being primary funk vocabulary, and it's not hard, so maybe you want to play through it once. Do it with one of my practice loops to hear some context.

I'm not into writing materials just based on mathematical logic, but with this particular idea, much of what you get from that turns out to be actual things that somebody played in real life. So I'll continue developing it, and hopefully end up with a more concise HEMIOLA THEORY OF FUNK DRUMMING.

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Tresillo inversion combinations

A library item for fairly hardcore individuals: two measure combinations of all of the tresillo inversions from the item at that link. This whole area of rhythm is extremely fertile to me— it's all familiar stuff, but I've never seen a really systematic study of it; and the further I get into doing that, the more connections I see with drumming as it exists in the wild. I'm working out a complete new system for funk drumming based on it, that should be very hip, and also very functional and accessible to players of all levels.

To save space I've written only two measures of each combination, and haven't given duplicate combinations where the same two measures are simply reversed. So you should play all of these starting on the first and second measure of the pattern— especially if you're making a funk groove out of them.

You can also use these as jazz comping rhythms for snare drum or bass drum, or as left hand parts for a bossa or samba, or even as bass drum variations for a baiao-type groove. And of course there's a lot more you can do.

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3/16 Control - 01

BOPWORKS STICKS NEWS: For those of you who asked about getting some free Bopworks sticks, I'll be sending them out this week. I'll email everyone who will be receiving them.

While I finish doing my taxes, here is an item in development. This is related to the late hemiola funk series, but I'm tired of looking at the word hemiola, so I'll call it 3/16 Control instead— since we're dealing with three-16th note patterns, played in */4 meters. The exercises develop some fundamental coordination and rhythmic ideas.

Play patterns 1-4 as written, and substituting the bass drum for the snare drum. I've given some practice ideas on page 2. Also try playing the 3/4 and 2/4 versions repeating unbroken in any meter— 3/4, 4/4, 5/4. Dig through my practice loops to find something to play with. Don't neglect patterns 3 and 4.

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Hemiola funk series - basic logic

I want to walk through the logic of this hemiola funk series of posts— at least the logic of one part of it, which may be difficult to see on playing through the materials. I feel I have to explain myself if I'm going to post a lot of pages developing an idea live on the blog like this. Here are the basic steps I am doing on those pages, with a little explanation:

Start with a basic 3:2 polyrhythm, written with 8th notes representing the 3 side. Notated here for cymbal and snare drum:

The native */4 meter for this is 3/4— that's the shortest */4 meter that can hold the uninterrupted pattern in a single measure. We get that by playing that pattern twice:

To be clear, this is not necessarily about a literal 3:2 polyrhythm, with three pulses played against two pulses. It's about fitting a running dotted-8th note rhythm into */4 meters— mainly 2/4 or 4/4. The 3 side of the polyrhythm, the 8th notes, just represent the context— the implied subdivision of the time signature. Our main interest is the dotted 8th notes:

As these rhythms occur in nature, they don't always start the same way. Here's the above pattern starting on its second beat:

Extend the pattern one more beat to put it into 4/4. The dashed “imaginary” barline divides the measure in half, which will be significant in a moment.

Now the weird/interesting part— reverse the pattern to start with the second half first:

...we see that same type of move in clave-based music, with 3-2 and 2-3 clave orientations, and we see it in Brazilian music. It's not so weird if we think of the rhythm as two measures of 2/4 rather than 4/4; I use a single measure of 4/4 only because it's common in modern North American music. The idea of reversing the parts may seem strange in the first place, but it certainly must have evolved organically. I think it's only seems strange because we're imposing a “1” on music that isn't as 1-centric as we are accustomed to— at least in the musics where these rhythms first came into common usage.


PROOF THIS IS NOT SOME JIVE I'M JUST MAKING UP:

The rhythms resulting from the above system turn up everywhere in nature. Two quick examples, using that last rhythm: it is the same as this common bossa nova rhythm, frequently mislabeled “bossa clave.” Here it is in a complete groove:

And it occurs in DC Go-go music— it's the bass drum rhythm that is the foundation of the entire style:

Now, the end game here is not to theorize about rhythm. I'm more interested in developing a fairly complete funk drumming vocabulary with a few simple drumming ideas, based on these concepts. The vocabulary already exists— I just want to turn it into a method. It's also good to understand the extent to which this 3:2 polyrhythm is truly the life blood of African-American music, and Afro-Latin music, and all of their derivatives. Without this, we would all be playing marches.