EZ Reed method - Jack's way - 02

Continuing a very easy system I'm using with a younger student— I feel kind of cheated that I wasn't taught this myself, and that I haven't been teaching it all these years. This is as elementary to playing drumset as RLRL is to playing snare drum. Everybody should be teaching this. This should be just about the first thing anyone plays on the drum set.  

Last time we played a simple rhythm from Syncopation, alternating between RH/RF in unison, and LH on snare. This time we'll alternate between both hands in unison, and bass drum. 

Once again we'll be reading from Progressive Steps to Syncopation, pp. 10-11, top line part only. At first play RH on cym / LH on snare, start with the hands and alternate. This is how you would play line 2:  

Also do them pseudo-alternating, starting every measure with the hands: 

And starting every measure with the bass drum: 

Measures that naturally start the same way every measure should be played starting with either thing. For example, play line 5 both of these ways:  

When I think of all the frustrating first drum set lessons I've given... I've always tried hard to simplify that first rock beat, to what ever extent an individual student needs, and it's still very difficult for many of them. This is completely natural expression of a rhythm on the full drum set, using normal drum set language, and it takes no independence at all. See the “worst drummer ever” post where the kid does this in the wild with no apparent instruction from anyone, because it's a totally natural thing to do. 

We've been doing this a*-backwards, people. We start them with a lot of rock beats, which take a fair amount of independence for a beginner, and save this entire area of easy non-independent stuff— which people use all the time for ordinary things like playing ensemble accents and set ups— for more advanced jazz students. No wonder the drum set is a strange, intimidating instrument to so many students.  

EZ Reed method: Jack's way

This is a very basic method improvised by a student of mine— for younger students, or as a remedial thing for others. It's good for orienting students in the Reed thing, playing full drum set parts non-independently, based on a single rhythm. Nobody reading this is going to do it themselves, so I'll address this post to teachers. 

Use Lesson 4, on pp. 10-11 of Syncopation. Play the top line book rhythm with an alternating sticking, with one hand on a cymbal, one hand on the snare, with the bass drum doubling the cymbal part. So line 2 from the book would be played: 

Sidebar: with that particular rhythm, they'll be playing Son Clave in 3/2 position with the right hand, and 2/3 position with the left hand. Interesting, I don't know what, if anything, that tells us about the origins of clave.

Played strictly alternating, many of the patterns will start on the opposite hand in the second measure. They should also be played “pseudo-alternating”, beginning every measure with the right hand, or the left hand: 

For rhythms that naturally start with the same hand every measure, have them also start with the opposite hand: 

Normally I have students play the right hand on the cymbal, but if they play it with the left instead, this could be an easy entry into developing left hand coordination with the bass drum, for intermediate students, or others who have neglected that.  

The idea is not necessarily to develop a particular type of vocabulary, although the results do resemble how you might play ensemble accents with set ups. Mainly this is just a foundational way of playing a rhythm directly on the drum set, so the student is thinking of a musical idea— the rhythm— and not about the independence required to do it. As is the case even with easy normal materials.   

Dejohnette patterns

UPDATE: Oops, there's a duplicate pattern in there— I think pattern 9 happens three times. And I got sloppy with my beaming standard. Oh well, it happens when you're rushing to post stuff.   

Some patterns extracted from these recent two Jack Dejohnette transcriptions. You could do essentially this with every transcription on the site— get your pencil, draw a bracket over any part of a transcription that looks interesting, practice that, develop it into something you can do in a musical texture. Sharpie a big rectangle around it. 

These are not particularly unique patterns— you can make something similar to them using a variety of sources, especially Stick Control and Syncopation. We'll take advantage of them all being written on one page (two pages) to practice combining them. Many of them are four note patterns played twice. At the end of page 2 there are some patterns that are essentially grooves. Patterns 7 and 19 are polyrhythmic/polymetric patterns that can be played over two or more bars of 4/4 or 2/2. 

Practicing these, I essentially play around with them as musical ideas, moving them around the drums and cymbals, varying the accents, playing obvious variations on them, and finding ways to end them other than by stopping on beat 1. I might practice them the same way as my “Funk/Figure/Cliché Control” pages, combining measures without stopping, one time each: 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, etc, 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, etc, 3-4, 3-5, etc, and so on.  

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Directions

Here's that Jack Dejohnette transcription I mentioned yesterday— on the intro of Directions, from Miles Davis Live at the Fillmore East - It's About Time.

The 8th note quintuplets I mentioned happen right up front, when he's playing half-free, not quite settled on the main groove. It's possible he worked out the 5s, or maybe he's thinking something else and is just pushing the rhythm around, a la yesterday's post.

The transcription begins at 0:38 in the recording.

All of the squirrelly stuff happens in the first four bars; after that he's in the main groove for the tune. It's mostly straightforward “non-independent” drumming, not unlike what we saw on another recent Dejohnette transcription. The simplest formula for doing that kind of thing is to play a Stone-type sticking pattern, with the RH on the cymbal (with bass drum in unison), LH on the snare. Here the snare drum is a little more active, and sometimes overlaps with the RH/cymbal part. And he doesn't play the cymbal on all of the bass drum hits. It would be easy to make some kind of formula to do that— and I probably will— or you can just do the Stick Control type thing a lot and play around with it, which is probably what Dejohnette did. 

I just made a label non-independent drumming, which is so far only attached to this post. If you dig around in the posts under the ECM label, you'll find most of what will eventually get that new label.  

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