Beats to fills - key 01

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. 

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Transcription: Billy Higgins - Blackjack

Billy Higgins playing on a funky vamp with some kicks in it, on Blackjack, from Donald Byrd's album of the same name. It sticks with the rhythm figure all the way through, and Higgins plays a lot of different stuff over it, rather than a repeating groove, so we get to see how he handles that. 

The transcription starts at 1:50, with the trumpet solo, ends at the piano solo. Tempo is 174, but the vamp suggests a half time feel. 

Here's the rhythm figure he's playing off of, usually filling to set up the syncopated accents starting at the beginning of the second measure, or on beats 4, 3, or 2 of the first measure:

It can make you kind of tense vamping relentlessly like this, if you don't vibe your way into some kind of groove with it. Which is not easy to find all the time. 

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Philly Joe set ups

Here's a tune involving a lot of isolated kicks on the & of 2, where we get to hear a lot of different ways Philly Joe Jones sets them up— Blue Roz the Milt Jackson / Wes Montgomery album Bags Meets Wes. I've had a lot of people asking about kicks and set ups lately— here you go:

You can practice those as part of a two-measure phrase like this: 

Also move the kick over to the & of 3: 

Add two measures to the front of that if you need a longer cycle. Get the timing accurate from the cymbal accent to the following beat where you get back to the time— from the & of 2 to the 4 in the first example, from the & of 3 to the 1 in the second. They're easy spots to rush.  

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Rhythm cycles

Here's a page to print out and staplegun to the wall by your drums: a summary of some major practice rhythms, and their inversions. Sometimes you don't need a readable page, you just need a quick reference to glance at. I should probably expand this and make a poster out of it. I'll certainly be updating it. 

Includes a couple of simple rhythms that don't have a name, and the Charleston rhythm, tresillo, cinquillo, three different rhythms in 3/4, played across the barline in 4/4. 

Play these as independent rhythms along with an ostinato, or in a Reed-style interpretation, or as ensemble rhythms/kicks— at the bottom are some practice phrases for that. Phrases 1 and 3 are good for a kick-type phrase, phrase 2 suggests a rhythm section figure, a la the tune Equinox. Plug in whichever practice rhythm you want in place of the example rhythm, of course. 

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Kicks and setups with Reed - 01

We covered this cursorily back in 2011, let's talk about it again, with some more detail. 

“Kicks and setups” is big band drummer speak for one of the major jobs of a jazz drummer, or any drummer: playing accents in unison with the rest of the ensemble, and setting them up to help the ensemble play them right, and for musical effect— usually with one note or two notes on a drum, or with a longer fill. So: 

Kick* = ensemble accent played by the drummer. Usually with cymbal and bass drum, or cymbal and snare drum, or snare drum or bass drum alone on staccato accents. 

Setup = what the drummer plays before the kick to support it. One to three 8th notes, or a longer fill.   

* - Not to be confused with the “kick drum” itself— on this site I say bass drum. 

Some examples of how kicks and set ups are indicated in big band charts or other arrangements: 

The major kicks in those examples are the offbeat tied notes and dotted notes, which typically call for a set up by the drummer.  

So: get out your mark up copy of Syncopation, and go to p. 10, and on the fourth measure of lines 1-8, add a tie to the last in any series of 8th notes. Here's my current working copy, which has a few other extraneous marks:

Notice on line 8 the tie will be at the beginning of the fourth measure. I don't know why I put it there on line 4, I could have put it the end of the line. 

We're only concerned with the tied notes, and the 8th notes right before them. Interpret the rest of the line as slash marks, meaning: play time. So we would read lines 1 and 8 as: 

The tied note is the kick, the other 8th notes are the set up. Play the kick on cymbal, with bass drum in unison, play the set up notes on the snare drum. Play swing time for the rest of the line.   

Here's how you would play lines 1 and 2: 

Play lines 5-8 with all three untied 8ths on the snare drum, or leave the first 8th note on the cymbal, for a two-note set up— which is extremely common. So line 8, both ways, goes: 

Also invert that basic orchestration, with the kick played on cymbal and snare drum, and the set up played on the bass drum. On lines 4-8, put only the last set up note on the bass drum: 

So the first step is to play lines 1-8 both of these ways, including counting the four measure phrase correctly, coming back into the time feel after the kick correctly. Next we'll look at some ways of embellishing this basic framework. 

Marking up Reed for chart reading practice

Continuing the kicks/set-ups Reed tweak— in aid of that kind of practicing, let's mark up the full-page exercises in Syncopation some more. You may not want to look at these changes all the time, so print out those pages, or get a second copy.

Exercise 4  on p. 41 has the most of the kind of activity we're looking for, so I'll use that. 

In the last post I suggested penciling in housetop accents on any off-beat long notes after a long space— three 8th notes worth of space before them, or more:

You'll notice a couple of those are not actual long notes— they're 8th notes with a rest after them. In the second and sixth lines. For these purposes we can treat them the same. 

Syncopation has a shortage of long notes on the &s of beats 2 and 4. They happen a lot in real life, they're rare in Reed. So let's make some by adding ties/accents to 8th notes on the & of 2/4, after a long space: 

To make it easier to read, let's mark the spaces where the set ups go. I put a little line there, you could write FILL, or whatever:
 

Oops, I missed one in the third line.

You can do this with all eight of the regular syncopation exercises in Reed— some are better than others. Start with 1 and 4, exercise 2 is not great. There are also a couple of the syncopation exercises in Louis Bellson's Reading Text in 4/4 that are usable, as well— pp. 18, 21-22. And my book, Syncopation in 3/4. 

Also see my much simpler post from 2011, Kicks and set ups using Syncopation. And probably my Chart reading pyramid while we're at it. And my 2021 post with other suggestions for marking up Syncopation. 

Reed tweaks: kicks and setups with RH lead triplets

An online student in Europe is working on his reading with me, in preparation for an audition, and we're talking about kicks and set ups. There's a minor tweak to a common Reed solo/fill method— right hand plays melody on drums/cymbals, left hand fills in triplets on snare— that will help with that. 

Part of that method is that any time RH notes are spaced greater than a quarter note, which would require multiple LH notes to fill the space, we break up those multiples by bringing the RH to the snare drum. I've written before about how we do that. Many of those spots are also places you would do a set up if you were reading an actual piece of music. 

Look at p. 38 in Syncopation, and pretend we're interpreting a big band chart, and find the syncopated hits that would require (or suggest) a set up from the drummer. We're looking for long notes on an &, with a long space before them. The second note, on the &, is the kick— you could pencil in housetop accents over each of those. Or print the page out and mark them.  

You can see most of them consist of a quarter note, an 8th rest, and then a quarter, dotted-quarter, or tied note. 

Here's how to play that, with 1) all the filler with the LH, 2) breaking up the filler with the RH, 3) playing that filler RH as an accent on the downbeat before the kick, 4) two note set up:

There are a couple of spots where there are two &s in a row— in the third and fifth lines. All through Syncopation they're just on the & of 1/3, in real life they'll often be on the & of 2/4. 

Again, how you would play that: 1) all filler with the LH, 2) filler broken up normally with the RH, 3) set up falling on the left hand, this time, 4) two note set up: 

Normally with this system the right hand is on the snare or toms, or cymbal + bass drum. To do this tweak, whatever you're hitting for the rest of the page, play the set ups on the drums, and the kicks on the cym + BD.  

Here's how you would play the second and third lines of p. 38, with the right hand playing the small tom for everything but the kicks: 

Or playing the two-note setups: 

There are other possibilities for what to do with the set ups, which we'll talk about later. The idea here is not just to play the thing, it's to read differently, to be able to identify the figures that need support from the drummer— syncopated hits after a long space. 

Next I'll have some suggestions for marking up Syncopation for this kind of practicing. 

EZ set ups and partial filler

I'm working through this with a student. It's an easy reading item for the drum set, with a narrow set of parameters, using my tresillo inversions page (lines 1-8 only), my tresillo inversion combinations page, and one of my full page reading pages— the one comprised of all notes at two- and three-8th note intervals.

The idea is to become familiar with some basic ways a drummer fills out a rhythm, adding set ups to the syncopated hits, and adding a little more filler to create a rhythmic flow, almost in a rubadub style. In this same unit of stuff I'm also having the student fill out the complete 8th note grid, which we don't need to talk about here. 

Start by printing out the pages above, and playing through them, with the entire rhythm part played with your right hand on a cymbal, plus the bass drum in unison. Ignore the stems-down “bass drum” part. Then add the left hand the following ways: 

Adding set ups
A set up is something a drummer plays to help the band catch a syncopated ensemble hit or figure. For example, if the horns play an isolate accent on an &, the drummer may set it up by hit a single note on the down beat before it.  

So anytime a note on an & comes up on these pages, set it up with the left hand on the snare drum on the downbeat before it: 

If there are two or more closely-spaced &s in a row, set up only the first one: 

So this line from the full page exercise above: 

With set ups added, would be played like this: 

 

More filler
You'll notice that on all of these pages, the notes are spaced at two- and three-8th notes intervals. The parts are 100% quarter notes or dotted-quarter notes— or their equivalents using ties and rests. To develop a more flowing texture, we'll add a left hand note at the end of every dotted quarter note or equivalently-spaced note. So the plain tresillo rhythm, which starts with two dotted quarters, would be played like this: 

Play this equivalent rhythm the same way: 

So, reading these exercises you have to be able to distinguish between a quarter note spacing and a three-8th note spacing: 

With the extra filler, play that line like this:

Another line with the three-8th intervals indicated: 

And how you would play it: 

Here's how you would play that same line, playing only the set ups, according to the rules above: 

Play this entire method with the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on snare drum. You could reverse the hands if you choose. I would also play it entirely with the right hand, and entirely with the left hand— and possibly with both hands in unison, playing two different cymbals, and unisons on two different drums, or flams on the same drum.  

This is not really a natural reading situation, of course— I narrowed the parameters to just those two rhythm intervals for the sake of overall simplicity, and for establishing a flow. This has been partly a reading/interpretation exercise, illustrating the way you might actually interpret rhythms on a chart or lead sheet; and partly a way of generating a certain type of improvised rhythmic flow. 

Philly Joe kicks and set ups

Companion to the Philly Joe Jones appreciation from the other day— I've transcribed some kicks and setups from the tune Soft Winds, from Chet Baker In New York. Jones plays figures all through the head; the time feel just to fill out some partial measures. In December I also wrote out the drum solo from this tune. It's an all around excellent track for jazz beginners to listen to, play along with, and learn. Dig up a chart, or write it out, play it with your friends. 

We're just looking at the broad outlines— I haven't written every detail of what he plays. Listen, and use the transcription as a guide. There are a few markings for straight 8ths, stick shots, and cymbal chokes. The straight 8th lick is very hip; I use variations of it all the time. Notice that he plays it a little different every time, sometimes very legato. On the head out he's using a brush, or a brush and a stick, or one brush played backwards. It doesn't matter, play it with sticks or brushes. Notice in the first measure of the head out Joe plays the kicks in the wrong spot— the trumpet is correct there. He also plays around it a little bit near the end. 

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Jazz fundamentals: more stick control for jazz

Another jazz fundamentals item, that pairs nicely with Monday's thing. These are some stick control patterns designed to be played on the drumset, for a specific jazz vocabulary lesson. That's a lot of what we do here. I wrote something like this back in March, with a slightly different purpose— a nice thing about having software like Finale is that it's easy to focus our materials.

This page is meant to help with adding the left hand to some basic cymbal rhythms, and also to help get the timing of some common figures— “additive rhythm” style. We'll be seeing that term again in coming days.

Swing the 8th notes. Play the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on the snare drum. Add bass drum to some or all of the RH notes. Add hihat on beats 2 and 4.

Some of the patterns have the option of playing the left hand on beat 1— those are to get the timing of a cymbal accent on the & of 4. 

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Page o' coordination: anticipations — 03

[NOTE: PDF link is working now! -t]

So, today is going to be jazz comping day, in our little fund raiser. If you haven't made a cash contribution yet, please do. Help give me some kind of rational excuse to continue creating and dumping this much otherwise-free content onto the Internet.

This is an intermediate Page o'..., designed for working on the very common anticipation on the & of 4. You'll play a lot of these in your career, so take special care learning the timing from the & of 4 to the following beat 2; it's easy to rush it. The exercises with a snare hit on beat 1 are really for helping you define that space, but maybe you'll be able to make them sound like music. You may also want to check out two previous POCs addressing a similar issue: one | two.

Swing the 8th notes. If you have any problem getting the time squared off during that space at the beginning of the measure, adding a snare drum hit on 1 will help you with that. I know we're playing jazz, and it seems like you want a “loose” feel, but your accuracy needs to be right on the money.

You could do our usual left hand moves with this page, but somehow the character of this page is different from many of the others, and that seems unnecessary to me; maybe just improvise some moves instead. Or whatever.

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Big band figure builder

Here's another installment of a thing I've been doing with several students, using Syncopation lesson 4 to get familiar with the basic moves and reading associated with setting up and kicking big band figures ("cutting" them, that is), or just interpreting a melody line on a lead sheet. The process is broken down to a number of logical, easy- darn near banal- interpretive steps. Read them carefully, and apply them to exercises 1-15:

These related posts should be very helpful: simple variations on lesson 4, kicks and set-ups using Syncopation, and basic big band set-ups.

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Basic big band set-ups

Another in the recent series of easy stuff, here is a page of basic set-ups for ensemble kicks on the & of 4. You can apply these to my earlier piece, Kicks and Set-ups Using Syncopation.

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Kicks and set-ups using Syncopation

Here's a little method I devised for working on basic big band-style kicks and set-ups, using Ted Reed's Syncopation. Like many of the ways of working with Reed, it involves some selective reading/interpretation, but in a constructive way. We're not just making things difficult because we don't feel like buying another book- the interpretive skills developed in this method are very close to what's required in playing actual charts. The biggest leap of imagination is putting in the ties, and you can mark those in with a pencil if you want.

Download the pdf from www.pdxdrummer.com.