On playalongs, pt. 2: play exercises

Stuff like this. Anything. Why not?

Back from tour and easing back into blogging, here, with part 2 in this thoughts on practicing along with recordings series. Today we'll discuss the value of not just playing the tune or drum part, “drum cover” style, but also playing technical exercises. For example, these days I like to run my Dahlgren & Fine and Gary Chaffee linear patterns along with tracks from Maggot Brain. In fact, just about the only way I can practice that book, and certain other very dry materials, is along with music.  



Broadening your hearing
Doing this gives you a chance to hear how the technical patterns sound in the context of real music, and will help you move them into your actual playing— which is a major issue nearly everyone deals with. Since you'll be forcing these things into a musical setting where they don't necessarily belong, you're going to hear a lot of things happen—good and bad— which you never would have played on purpose. You'll be surprised at how often random things actually work together, though. It's a crash course in the Rubber Shirt principle— random musical ideas tend to work together because you put them together.


What and how
You can use anything that will work with the tempo and feel/rhythmic grid of the recording. You can decide for yourself how much you want to conform to the song: you could follow the form or phrasing of the song, changing exercises along with song phrases or sections, or not. You could also alternate exercises with playing time in the style of the track. On the more advanced end of things, if you're learning how how to play meter-within-meter, you could run exercises in 3/4 or 6/8 along with a song in 4/4, and practice improvising resolutions of the resulting polyrhythmic phrases to match the phrase endings in the song.


A musical standard
Often when doing your technical exercises in isolation with a metronome, you have no external reason to play them with some shape, so you play them with a “neutral” phrasing and dynamic level, and your one standard of progress tends to become simply more speed. Playing them along with music, suddenly the problem becomes how to make them sound and feel good with what you're hearing— which is the whole name of the game in actually playing music. For me, anyway; music is nearly always a process of making whatever you're playing feel good based on what you're hearing; it is almost never just a process of just rendering patterns perfectly. For me. That's not to say there's nothing to be gained by learning to render patterns precisely in a neutral, non-musical way, but that is a different process than the one you will use in actually making music.


More coming soon...

On playalongs, pt.1: use real music

That's the idea.

I was working on a single post about practicing along with recorded music— something I've been doing a lot of lately— but it was running long on me, and taking forever to finish. I need to start acting like a blogger and getting stuff out there in shorter bits, so here are some thoughts on choosing music to play along with:


Real vs. simulated
Generic playalong collections, like the popular Groove Essentials series, are fine for getting together the very basics of a style, or for getting a general sense of your readiness for the professional world. You get clean recordings which closely resemble music in a variety of (mostly) common styles, as they might be played by the best American musicians. But don't mistake them for the real act of making music, despite their similarity to it: to me they are a gutted, abstracted form of playing. They're missing the actual things you're supposed to be playing in support of, the real impetus for most of what you play: a melody, and a lead voice.

Compare the experience of playing along with some of our previous pop transcriptions: God, Anticipation, or Beauty And The Beast, with that of any of the rock/pop entries from GE— here's one:



What is missing from the naked rhythm tracks should be obvious. On the actual records, the rhythm section parts are only one element of what the drummers are playing off of; they are equally focused on what is happening in the melody; their parts are intimately connected with it, and closely track its dynamics, and overall arc. You only get the barest shadow of that with the playalongs. Being able to play convincingly to a generic rhythm track— to play blind, essentially— is a real skill, but it is not the main thing.

Much more of this after the break:

Podcast — Episode 6: Todd's playalong tracks

Hey, we haven't done a podcast in some time, have we? I've been doing most of my drumset practicing along with recordings recently— book exercises and everything— and I thought I'd share some of the things I've been using, along with a few notes about them. You'll probably want to download the mp3, and cut it up into individual tracks using Audacity, or whatever, and then load them onto your mp3 player.

You can just play along with these normally in the style of the tune, but I also recommend using them for your technical/book stuff; hearing those materials in context will help you move them into your regular playing. You can also play along in any style you want, if it sort-of fits— most often I'll play stuff from funk or rock books along with Brazilian recordings— hopefully it will give you a little bit of a different take both on how you play the style of the recording, and the style you are playing “against” it.

You can listen on the embedded player, or at the podomatic site, or you can download the mp3:



Here's a list of the tracks, with some notes on them:

Funkadelic — Can You Get To That
I've been doing two major things with this: pp. 11-22 of the Burns/Farris funk book, and the “harmonic” coordination section of Dahlgren & Fine. You can also just learn the actual groove from the recording.

Nara Leão — Nanã
I used this when I was first starting to crack that section of Dahlgren & Fine because I like the song, and the tempo is nice and relaxed.

Milton Banana — Linha De Passe
A nice bright samba. You should notice a big difference in feel between playing with this vs. a group of American jazz musicians playing a similar-tempo samba; the authentic rhythms make more sense— and are pretty much unavoidable— when playing with recordings of Brazilian musicians. Try using my page of Brazilian rhythms, playing both hands in unison on the cymbal and snare, over the samba BD/HH ostinato.

Milton Banana — Acquarela
A modern baiao type of feel, with a samba on the B section. I've been using this to work on my baiao, but you could play any funk material along with this. I think in general people overplay their funk stuff, and this will give you an avenue for lightening your touch.

Batacumbele — Se Le Fue
I've been using this to work on my songo, with the workout from Ed Uribe's Essence of Afro-Cuban Percussion and Drum Set. If you don't have that, or another good book, you could use my songo page o' coordination. Clave is 2/3 son, and is consistent all the way through the piece.

Eddie Palmieri — Vamanos Pal'Monte
Mambo— maybe someone with better knowledge of salsa songstyles than me can give a more precise ID of the style. There's a tempo change towards the end, which will give you a little test on the material you played through during the first part. I've been using the mambo workout from Uribe's book, but any mambo, Latin jazz, or cascara materials you have should work with it. Clave is, again, 2/3 son.

Continued after the break:

Sampled play-along loops

This is something I've been doing lately- making play-along loops from drumless parts (usually intros) of favorite tracks. My attorney tells me this is of dubious legality distrubution-wise, but until I receive a cease-and-desist letter from Keith Jarrett's ghost, I'll leave them on my site free of charge for you to use as you like. You should buy the mp3 of the complete tune, if not for ethical reasons, at least so you know what's going on musically on the track. You can use the links I've provided, or go to Amazon or iTunes.

The loops are very quick and dirty- you may hear a pop at the top of the loop, and tempos may fluctuate slightly. This is actually a good thing- it forces you to listen and adapt. They are not meant to replace a metronome- I would use them more for creative practice rather than time feels. You can also make your own using the free program Audacity.