Page o' skiplets - UPDATED

UPDATE: Boy, I suck— it turns out this thing is riddled with typos in the 4/4 versions. I'll let you know when I've posted the corrected version...

You know, instead of saying “skiplets”— a very stupid word I made up for the repeating three-note pattern of the standard jazz cymbal rhythm— I could have just said spangalang. It's real jock-sounding and I hate it, but I could have named this system something pompous like Spangalang Theory. The Spangalang Method. Maybe I'll do that with the book.  

I've updated the original page o' skiplets somewhat— for use with a couple of students. I wrote out each skiplet coordination unit in it's normal orientation and environment, in a full measure of 4/4 time. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose, but there you are.

I also circled some notes, which could be played on the bass drum. So you can play the snare part 1) all on the snare drum, 2) all on the bass drum, 3) circled notes on bass drum, uncircled notes on the snare drum. Here's the explanation of this system.  

It is an excellent system for learning jazz coordination quickly and completely, or for correcting weak coordination— much more satisfactory than the traditional way where someone assigns you some pages from Chapin and you go in the practice room and bash them out, with inconsistent results. 

I don't think these pages are completely successful, though. A better way to teach and learn this system might be to use a conventional resource like Advanced Techniques, and draw a phrase mark over the relevant portion. It does need to be done with a teacher (me, because I don't know of anyone else who teaches this way) there are too many ways for a student to misunderstand it, if he or she doesn't already know the terrain a little bit.  

Get the pdf

Page o' skiplets - 01

This is not a great method to self-teach, but for the few intrepid individuals this will help, or for the teachers out there whose students struggle to pick up jazz independence, this approach may help speed up the learning process. It will also help you clean up your jazz coordination all around, since a lot of players (i.e. me) learn this stuff in a brute force frenzy of practicing a lot of patterns, and usually you end up with your execution being not as sharp as it could be.

Before you start, read my previous posts defining this made-up word skiplet, and summarizing the method. It wouldn't be a terrible idea to revisit my old post What it is: swing rhythm just to clarify how the rhythmic system works— in jazz we think in terms of 8th notes while we're playing these triplet based rhythms.

Following the instructions carefully is rather important— if you do this wrong, you could screw up the rhythm and/or end up habitually hearing the rhythm with the beat turned around. You don't want that. Before attempting this method, students who are just beginning with jazz should make themselves very familiar with the jazz cymbal and hihat rhythm, so they definitely know where the 1 is, and they know the hihat falls on 2 and 4.

Note that there are no barlines and there is no time signature. Each exercise is a rhythmic fragment, which you'll need to count correctly to end up with a correct jazz rhythm.

Put in a pause
Treat the last note of each exercise as a fermata— an unmetered held note. Don't accidentally turn the pause into a metered rest, or fall into a repetitive groove with it. Play the skiplet exercise one time, stop, take a breath, think about birds, then play it again. You can gradually shorten the pause until you're playing the exercise repetitively in time.

Alternatively, after you can play the exercise one time, try playing it two times in rhythm, with no pause. Once you can play the exercise four times in rhythm, you should be able to play it repetitively at that tempo.

Start counting on 2
The skiplet pattern played in repetition should be counted 2 &3, 4 &1. Where there is a pick up note before the first cymbal note, count &2 &3, &4 &1, etc. It's up to you if you want to count any triplet partials in an exercise, using triplet syllables— 2-trip-let or 2-&-a.

Think of it as a sticking
Ignoring the hihat part, say the exercise as a sticking, in rhythm, using right, left, or both.

Exercise 2 would be both, right-right 

Exercise 9 would be right-left-both-right 

Exercise 11 would be left-both, right-right 

It's a good idea to refer back to jazz independence patterns written normally in 4/4, with a cymbal rhythm, as you do this— see Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques For The Modern Drummer, or Joel Rothman's Basic Drumming or other jazz books.

Get the pdf

“Skiplet” analysis— a line of music

Continuing with the analysis portion of this skiplet-based method of jazz coordination-thingy, in which, in order to learn independence vs. a jazz time feel, we orient everything around the three close-together notes of the cymbal pattern:

A reminder: I promise you this is not just a mass of analytical BS, with which to burden your students until they fire you, and quit drumming. The thing we're trying to do is hard, and it is usually handed to students with no strategy for learning it— they are expected to get it by brute-force practice. What we're doing is giving an actual process for this task; we're replacing no-instruction with instruction. So, it may look like we're complicating the task, but what we're really doing is clarifying it.

The goal in these first posts is just to show you the basic idea, and how to attach the independent notes to the cymbal pattern. Do refer back to the original post on this subject if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

First, here is a very well known line of music from Ted Reed's famous book:

A common interpretation— the relevant one to what we've been talking about— is to play the top line of the exercise (ignoring the bottom line), while playing jazz time with the cymbal and hihat, swinging all of the 8th notes. Doing that to the line above gives you this:

Here is how we break that up skiplet-style— any notes on the & of 1 or 3 are attached to the skiplet following it. Note that at the end, we play all the way to the 1 of the next line of music— not shown above— which happens to have a snare drum note on it. With this method, we always deal in complete skiplets.

Of course, this is usually done directly, without having the cymbal part written out— the student needs to end up with the complete part, while reading out of Reed. Next time we'll talk about how to get there— how I go about actually teaching this approach.

“Skiplet” analysis — the basics

A few weeks ago we introduced a new term, that is totally made-up by me: skiplet. It refers to the cluster of three notes of the standard jazz ride cymbal pattern starting on beat 2, and on beat 4:

In working with students on jazz independence, I found that it was helpful to isolate those notes, and treat them as a unit, integrating it with the independent part. Giving that unit a name, however stupid, helped with that.

Today we'll begin a series of posts talking about how I'm using this idea in teaching, starting by looking at some jazz independence exercises, and seeing how the different left hand parts effect the skiplet analysis of the pattern— since we're turning the the skiplet plus the independent part into one thing, the two-beat coordination idea may overhang the bounds of the skiplet proper... it will make sense. Next time I'll show you how to break down a whole line of non-repeating patterns, and then give you my own method for working through this with my students.

First let's pull the skiplet from a full measure of jazz time, written as 8th notes (to be played with a swing interpretation), with the normal hihat part added. There's no time signature given here, but the meter is 4/4:

Being skiplet-oriented, our thinking about the pattern becomes less of this barline bound rhythm 1, 2-& 3, 4-& ; we're now thinking the same way your body feels the rhythm as you play it, as 2-& 3, 4-& 1:

Adding the left hand, patterns starting and ending with skiplet notes are easy enough to figure out:

Any time the independent part fills out beat 1 or 3— whenever the rhythm on those beats is something other than a quarter note, our little coordination unit will be a little longer. If the middle of the triplet, or the entire triplet, is written, we think of those notes as coming on the end of the skiplet before it:

If there are plain 8th notes on beats 1 or 3— we're swinging them, so those &s of 1 or 3 will fall on the last note of a triplet— those &s are attached to the skiplet following it, as a pickup:

This will cover every pattern using swing 8th notes or 8th note triplets. Knowing this way of thinking helps students be absolutely clear on the architecture of the patterns they're attempting to play, and eliminates some common confusion related to being barline-and-downbeat oriented. Next we'll analyze a non-repeating line of music from Syncopation, and then talk about actually teaching this approach.

“Skiplet”?

In some ways I feel I'm watching (and contributing to) the death of the familiar jazz ride cymbal pattern as a musical thing, for a lot of reasons, but partly as the result of a whole lot of practice room abuse by uncommitted players. Lots of drummers are working on it, but very few of them are even listening to much actual jazz music, let alone making music with it. It's becoming just an obligatory drummer-thing, and we're starting to see people feeling free to invent their own stylized way of playing it, and making their own totally wrong pronouncements about it, seemingly without fear of being corrected by actual jazz musicians.

So I have mixed feelings about going further with the theory of it in an open setting like this. I don't really want to teach non-jazz musician teachers how to fake out their students better. But for all the people of noble purpose out there, this is one I've been working on for awhile:

The way I learned all my basic jazz coordination was through brute force; my teacher pointed me at some pages of Reed or Chapin, said “learn that”, and cut me loose to go figure it out how to play them. I didn't have any kind of system for doing that, so I just kept hacking away at them until I got it. There may be benefits to doing it that way, but it left me susceptible to weak spots in my playing— certain little coordinational things I learned well enough to get through the page, but not really well enough to be able to use in real playing.

To remedy that, in my own teaching, I want to have absolute clarity on all the little internals of the idea, and came up with my “kernel” theory of practice, in which you isolate clusters of notes, and coordinate around them. With jazz, that means using a single time through the basic unit of the pattern, “2, &-3” (or “4, &-1”, if you prefer):

Now, I don't like the idea of giving everything in music a name— I think it's orthodoxy-creating— but I've also wasted a lot of time and confused a lot of students calling the above thing “the 2, &-3”, or “the ding-da-ding”, and I wanted an easier way to refer to it as a discrete entity. Kind of like the tresillo in Salsa music. Tresillo means triplet, and refers to the three notes on the “3” side of clave. The middle note of the jazz pattern is sometimes called the skip note, so it only took a minute for my little rat-brain to come up with the word skiplet.

...

Stupid? Yes, it's stupid, but I can't be bothered with that. Jazz theory is full of made-up shit. Just be aware that it's something I made up, and if go into your next lesson with Billy Hart and say “skiplet”, he'll probably either laugh in your face or throw you out, maybe both. Soon we'll break this down a little further, looking at how you handle Chapin from a skiplet-oriented perspective...