I'm pretty sure I've written something like this before, but navigating my voluminous archives is no easier for me than it is for you. This is a sketch of some ideas in an upcoming[??? -tb] book release I'm working on. It's part of a larger system, but for now you can work on them as individual patterns:
RH on cymbal / LH on snare unless otherwise indicated. The repetitive format here is for practice purposes, in real music you would mostly do these one time only as part of a larger swing or 12/8 texture. Move them around the drums however you like.
Try them with this loop or this loop. For example of the type of playing I have in mind, see Jack Dejohnette playing on a couple of slow tunes on John Scofield's album Time On My Hands.
I guess you could do this with Reed— or just practice the page below by itself and start using it.
NOTE:After completing this post, I see that I wrote two very similar things back in 2014— I like this way better than either of those— hit those links to check them out.
This is based one of the basic Reed systems, right hand lead triplets— swing the book rhythm, played on a cymbal with the RH, with BD in unison, filling in the triplets on the snare drum with the LH.
Here we're going to fill the spaces in the book rhythm with 16th triplets— each triplet partial of filler gets a 16th triplet. We'll play them as singles, always starting with the RH.
With a couple of modifications:
• Let's catch the second cymbal hit with the left when they're on adjacent triplet partials (see exercises 3-5, 9-10). Use a cymbal on the left for that. On some of those you hit the cymbal with the R the first time, with the L on the repeat.
• We want the singles to start and end with the RH, so where there's just one triplet of filler, stick them RLL or RRL, or just play a left handed flam (see ex. 3-4). Where there is a full beat of filler, play 32nd notes instead— eight notes (exs. 6-7, 8, 11).
I'm not even going to spell out again how these exercises connect to the rhythms in Reed— if you should doing this, it should be obvious:
We see hear some of this kind of thing from Jack Dejohnette on John Scofield's Time On My Hands record— playing fast on a slow tempo. Peter Erksine, who produced that record, gave a master class at the U. of Oregon about this time, and remarked that Dejohnette was the only person he knew who could do that. Of course you have to be able to hear it as well as do it.
I was doing this with a loop of Mr. Syms, from Coltrane Plays The Blues, tempo about 98 bpm, and that's getting close to the practical speed limit on this idea. You can do it faster, hyper speed singles just start sounding ridiculous at some point.
Hey, we haven't done one of these in a while. All the tempos from four very famous Miles Davis records, with his very famous quintet from the 50s, with Philly Joe Jones on drums— core literature.
Workin' It Never Entered My Mind - 58 Four - 207 In Your Own Sweet Way - 114 The Theme (take 1) - 137 Trane's Blues - 164 Ahmad's Blues - 114 Half Nelson - 257 The Theme (take 2) - 132
Cookin' My Funny Valentine - 67 Blues By Five - 177 Airegin - 292 Tune Up - 315 When Lights Are Low - 123
Steamin' Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128 Salt Peanuts - 350 Something I Dreamed Last Night - 56 Diane - 143 Well, You Needn't - 230 When I Fall In Love - 67
Relaxin' If I Were A Bell - 184 You're My Everything - 57 I Could Write A Book - 227 Oleo - 258 It Could Happen To You - 188 Woody'n You - 256
All of them, again, in ascending order: Something I Dreamed Last Night - 56 You're My Everything - 57 It Never Entered My Mind - 58 My Funny Valentine - 67 When I Fall In Love - 67 Ahmad's Blues - 114 In Your Own Sweet Way - 114 When Lights Are Low - 123 Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128 The Theme (take 2) - 132 The Theme (take 1) - 137 Diane - 143 Trane's Blues - 164 Blues By Five - 177 If I Were A Bell - 184 It Could Happen To You - 188 Four - 207 I Could Write A Book - 227 Well, You Needn't - 230 Woody'n You - 256 Half Nelson - 257 Oleo - 258 Airegin - 292 Tune Up - 315 Salt Peanuts - 350
It's good to attach a number to these things, and know that Miles ballads, in this period at least, gravitated around 57 and 67 bpm. Those showy numbers like Half Nelson and Woody'n You are around 257. Those slow medium items @ 114, and two different types of bright swingers around ~185 and ~230.
And here— for my own peculiar interest— are all of them doubled or halved to put them in the familiar ~100-200 range— the medium to top end of standard metronome range. Useful and helpful as a practical thing dealing with time. There's got to be some kind of useful information in Miles putting a lot of tunes in tempos that equalize to the low to mid teens, or high 120s to mid 130s.
Four - 103 Something I Dreamed Last Night - 112 You're My Everything - 114 Ahmad's Blues - 114 In Your Own Sweet Way - 114 I Could Write A Book - 114 Well, You Needn't - 115 It Never Entered My Mind - 116 When Lights Are Low - 123 Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128 Woody'n You - 128 Half Nelson - 129 Oleo - 129 The Theme (take 2) - 132 My Funny Valentine - 134 When I Fall In Love - 134 The Theme (take 1) - 137 Diane - 143 Airegin - 146 Tune Up - 157 Trane's Blues - 164 Salt Peanuts - 175 Blues By Five - 177 If I Were A Bell - 184 It Could Happen To You - 188
Transcription of a slow tune, Lil' Darlin', as played by Al Harewood, with George Benson. This is a really great group of Benson's, with Mickey Tucker and George Duvivier, recorded on a Jazz Hour album called Witchcraft.
Anyway, the tune was written by Neil Hefti, in the 50s, for Count Basie's band. On this recording there's a four bar intro, and then the tune is 32 bars long— a 16 bar AABA played twice. I've written out just the intro and head. We're just looking at how Harewood plays the tune. It's not that easy to play those syncopated kicks and maintain groove at this tempo, about 65 bpm.
The 8th notes are swung, basically in a triplet feel, which is the basic groove of the tune— that very broad Basie groove. But he plays a wider dotted 8th/16th rhythm on the bass drum at times. In fact there's much more going on with rhythm than just a stereotyped Basie groove. If you listen through the whole recording you'll hear that the players are not always playing the same feel— rhythm might be playing a triplet feel while the soloist is double timing, or there may be different feels happening within the rhythm section. It's very open.
The tied quarter notes in the first four lines are just brush texture, maybe with a light quarter note pulse. Untied quarter notes with the brushes are articulated, maybe with the left hand playing texture. The staccato open hihat accents in the third line are fast chokes with the foot, I simplified the notation there.
Bringing this back to planet Earth, here's a nice 65 bpm blues to practice along with. Sampled from the tune After Hours on Roy Haynes's album We Three.
From Ben Riley's 1986 interview in Modern Drummer with Jeff Potter:
“In my first experience with [Thelonious Monk], in Amsterdam, we played 'Embraceable You' as a very slow ballad. Then he went into 'Don't Blame Me.' He stood up, looked over to me, and said, 'Drum solo!'
Fortunately for me, I had been working at the Upper East Side supper clubs playing a lot of brushes, and I like brushes. So when I played it, I didn't have to double the tempo, because I was used to playing slow brush tempos. I played it right at the tempo he gave me.
When we were going back to the dressing room, he just walked by me and said, 'How many people you know could have done that?' and he kept on going.”
It seems like Monk liked to spring that on drummers the first time he played with them— in the same situation, Riley apparently fared better than Frankie Dunlop, who shared this horrifying, hilarious story with Scott Fish:
A simple system here, that nevertheless has a number of possibilities, that I was playing using with my own book, Syncopation in 3/4, along with the Bill Frisell / Where In The World loop in 9/8. It's fast filler for slower triplet-feel tempos. I was also sloppy in writing this, creating an opening to make your own decisions on how to do it.
Here are the basic things you do with any single beat of rhythm in Syncopation. As always, we're interpreting the top line rhythm from the book, ignoring the bottom line part.
So if you see this rhythm in the book, you'd play:
There's nothing sounding on beat 4 there, so you fill out the entire beat with the triplet 16ths*. Also note the sticking on beat 3— the basic interpretation has all of the cymbal notes played with the right hand, but you can alternate when there are two cymbal note in a row with triplet spacing. You can then make the quick move to fill the middle of the triplet with either hand, or leave it open, as in the next example.
You don't need to play wall-to-wall notes— you can introduce some space to mostly do only five stroke singles as filler, like so:
Let's review the options for this rhythm:
The basic thing, alternating all the 16ths:
With some space added:
If you have any problem with the timing of the 16th notes, play the fill as left handed flams, triplet rhythm— a good thing to practice in its own right:
After that's very solid, you can adjust the timing of the left hand to make the 16th notes.
* - Sidebar: about 16th notes in a triplet-feel environment The 16th notes here are played at the same rate as ordinary sixtuplets, but we're playing them off of a three-note, 8th note triplet subdivision, like 16th notes in compound meters— 6/8 or 12/8:
Regular sixtuplets and 16th note triplets in 4/4 have an implicit 8th note subdivision:
The rhythm is exactly the same, but with this system we're basing them off of 8th note triplets rather than 8th notes.
Following up on this post about that 80s Heavy Metal triplet groove— a student who is mainly a Metal drummer requested some help working out some vocabulary for a song in 6/8, and these are some things we went over in our lesson. The fill portion will be good for other things, too— like in a slow swing feel, a la Jack Dejohnette on the one John Scofield record, where he plays some fast stuff at a slow tempo.
It's hard to improvise in this type of groove environment; the main groove is easy, but the usual tempo range puts everything else at awkward rates of speed for drummers— the main dotted-quarter note beat is typically an uncomfortable moderato, the 8th notes feel kind of slow for fills, the 16th notes may be very fast. Your hands will want to lapse into four-note subdivisions, and that will usually sound very wrong. So you mostly have have to stay on the 8th notes— the triplet-feel subdivision. We had this same problem on Lopsy Lu, and any number of things using that 70s triplet feel, across a number of genres.
This always hung me up— the seemingly infinite tempo possibilities for any one thing you practice. It was a constantly lurking thing that I'm not doing this fast enough, and you would never feel like you completed something. I think it stole my focus from learning something really well at the tempo at which I was doing it then.
Some guidelines, then, for thinking about tempo when practicing, for settling down and having a clear purpose about what you're doing:
Relax about baby tempos You need to be able to play the slow tempos great, too, so why the rush to just play faster? Everyone wants to play things at “flow” speed, where your hands are moving in a continuous motion, but many times you just have to carefully place every single note. So practice sounding great while doing that. And having worked it out thoroughly, you'll sound better at tempos where the rate of notes has a more natural flow.
Know the destined tempo Tempo suggestions in drumming books may not always be totally realistic. See the absurd "half note = 120" in the hardest parts of Dahlgren & Fine. That's just an invitation by the book's author for you to feel inadequate forever. Go to your record collection and find some playing in the style of what you're practicing, and make that your goal. You mostly don't need to do very complicated dense stuff extremely fast; sparse things that are dull at slow tempos may be designed to be played fast.
Technical issues Beware when you're playing a thing so fast you need to devise a special technique to do it. You may be doing the thing faster than intended. Or possibly your normal technique is needlessly complex and it's slowing you down. Check both things carefully.
Two tempos Play the page at a moderately slow tempo, then a moderately fast tempo, and move on. A comfortable medium tempo where you can achieve some relaxation, and a faster tempo where you're pushing yourself a little bit. I like the tempos suggested in A Funky Primer: quarter note = 86, and qn = 120. I like qn = 64 if you need to add a level below that.
Default It's easy to just start playing without thinking about a tempo beforehand, but don't just play your default tempo all the time. Know what tempo you're playing, and choose your tempos on purpose.
Out of time Some very demanding things— eg, heavy independence practice— don't need to be in time, at first. Play them slow to begin with, then take all the extra time you need to get the next note in the pattern. Just try to keep the rhythm roughly proportional to what's on the page.
Once every dozen years of blogging, I like to write about ballads— slow tunes you play on jazz gigs. They do exist. Possibly I don't write about them much because I learned to play them completely on the job, through playing with others; I don't have any kind of cohesive drumming theory about handling them.
Ballads are kind of complicated with regards to tempo, time and feel. Sometimes they'll have a persistent triplet-based swing feel, or they'll pull strongly towards a double time feel, or be played semi rubato. The bassist may play whole notes, play in 2, or walk, embellishing with triplets, straight 8ths, or 16th notes, or swing 8ths in double time. Often all of the above will happen in the course of the tune, or all at once.
Almost always someone calls the tune and counts it off and you play whatever. I've only ever had one band leader make a distinction between ballad feels when calling tunes— he would say walking ballad when he wanted the bass to play in 4 the whole time, or 12/8 ballad when he wanted a triplet-based swing feel all the way through, no double time— that didn't mean he wanted me to play triplets the whole time, like we were playing Unchained Melody. Most often in modern playing, the drummer has a lot of freedom to play texturally, and not just hold down the time.
Getting the tempos off the records is more complicated than normal, because tempos often tend to not be 100% locked down for the whole duration of the tune. So consider these to be approximate. There are some more notes at the end.
45 - Body And Soul - Freddie Hubbard / Here To Stay 47 - Body And Soul - Stan Getz / Billy High Street Samba 49 - Body And Soul - Sarah Vaughn / The Essential 49 - Lonely Woman - Pat Metheny / Rejoicing 49 - I Fall In Love To Easily - Miles Davis / Seven Steps To Heaven
50 - I Loves You Porgy - Bill Evans / Waltz For Debby 51 - Body And Soul - Pee Wee Russel / College Concert 52 - Infant Eyes - Wayne Shorter / Speak No Evil 55 - Blue In Green - Miles Davis / Kind Of Blue 55 - Spring Is Here - Bill Evans / Portrait In Jazz
56 - Flamenco Sketches - Miles Davis / Kind Of Blue 56 - Lush Life - John Coltrane / & Johnny Hartman 56 - Virgo - Wayne Shorter / Night Dreamer 56 - Body And Soul - Tony Williams / Young At Heart 57 - I Thought About You - Miles Davis / Someday My Prince Will Come
57 - It Never Entered My Mind - Miles Davis / Vol. 1 57 - It Never Entered My Mind - Miles Davis / Workin' 57 - The Peacocks - Stan Getz / The Peacocks 59 - Stella By Starlight - Miles Davis / My Funny Valentine 60 - Naima - John Coltrane / Giant Steps
60 - You Are Too Beautiful - John Coltrane / & Johnny Hartman 61 - Dedicated To You - John Coltrane / & Johnny Hartman 61 - I Wish I Knew - John Coltrane / Ballads 62 - Body And Soul - Don Cherry / Art Deco 62 - I Remember You - Stanley Turrentine & Milt Jackson / Cherry
62 - My Funny Valentine - Miles Davis / My Funny Valentine 62 - Old Folks - Pat Metheny / Question & Answer 63 - My One And Only Love - John Coltrane / & Johnny Hartman 63 - Too Young To Go Steady - John Coltrane / Ballads 64 - How Deep Is The Ocean - Miles Davis / Vol. 1
64 - When I Fall In Love - Miles Davis / Steamin' 65 - Lover Man - Charlie Parker / Complete Dial Masters 65 - Nancy (With The Laughing Face) - Cannonball Adderley / Know What I Mean? 66 - Body And Soul - Sonny Stitt / New York Jazz 66 - It's Easy To Remember - John Coltrane / Ballads
66 - There Is No Greater Love - Miles Davis / The New Quintet 67 - Blue In Grean - Bill Evans / Portrait In Jazz 67 - Dancing In The Dark - Cannonball Adderly - Somethin' Else 67 - Say It (Over And Over Again) - John Coltrane / Ballads 68 - Body And Soul - Buddy Rich / Keep The Customer Satisfied
68 - Body And Soul - Frank Sinatra / Beautiful Ballads And Love Songs 68 - Nancy (With The Laughing Face) - John Coltrane / Ballads 69 - Out Of Nowhere - Charlie Parker / Complete Dial Masters 70 - Body And Soul - Stan Getz / Body And Soul 72 - Body And Soul - John Coltrane / Coltrane's Sound
72 - Soul Eyes - John Coltrane / Coltrane 74 - Crazy He Calls Me - Ahmad Jamal / The Piano Scene 76 - Body And Soul - Stan Kenton / Artistry In Rhythm 76 - Central Park West - John Coltrane / Coltrane's Sound 77 - Body And Soul - Duke Ellington / Centennial
78 - What's New - Ahmad Jamal / Legendary Trio 78 - Body And Soul - Sarah Vaughan / Complete Recordings With Clifford Brown 78 - Embraceable You - Charlie Parker / Complete Dial Masters 79 - Body And Soul - Thelonious Monk / Monk's Dream 80 - Moonlight In Vermont - Ahmad Jamal / Legendary Trio
82 - Fall - Miles Davis / Nefertiti 85 - Body And Soul - Lester Young / Masters Of Jazz 89 - Come Rain Or Come Shine - Bill Evans / Portrait In Jazz 92 - Body And Soul - Coleman Hawkins / Jazz Masters 110 - Body And Soul - Lee Konitz / Peacemeal
I grabbed quite a few versions of Body And Soul— it's an extremely popular ballad, but it also seems to have the double time feel built into it— even when you're playing the slow tempo, you suggest the double time, that's how you play it. So I was curious if artists tended to gravitate to a certain tempo range when playing it— obviously, they don't.
The Charlie Parker recordings mostly are brighter tempos, and played in 4, with a walking bass.
Most of these are popular tunes and recordings, and this is a good listening assignment for anyone wanting get their ballad playing together. The list seems to want some further analysis, so maybe I'll post about that later.
A new practice loop sampled from Blues at Twilight, from Milt Jackson's album Plenty, Plenty Soul. Horace Silver is on piano here. Tempo is 75 bpm, so this is a good one for getting your triplet coordination together— with my recent pages of triplet patterns, for example, or Gary Chaffee's pain-in-the-neck jazz materials.
Be sure to download my practice loop archive (it doesn't include this) while it's still available.
The time fluctuates a bit at the beginning of the sample, before the drums come in. A couple of beats just drag a bit, and I found it not to be a problem. It sometimes happens in playing that the group decides to make a beat too long, and you have to adjust. I probably wouldn't want to be practicing to something that rushes, however.
A rhythm issue I've been thinking about is the equivalence of tempos and their halves and doubles. I was wondering how small a range of tempos would cover the entire practical range of performance tempos. A mathematically minded individual could probably figure it out in a second, if he knew anything about music. I checked, and he doesn't, so I had to actually think it through myself.
The answer is 52-100, which includes sixteen standard metronome markings:
52 54 56 58 60 63 66 69 72 76 80 84 88 92 96 100
Let's walk through it:
Standard metronome tempo range: 40-208
Before digital metronomes, that's what they used to mark on all metronomes. It's a realistic practical tempo range for most music.
Tempo range in actual performance: 25-400
At least, there are examples of recorded music in approximately that range. Tempos from 200-280 are common in jazz, tempos from 280-400 are increasingly uncommon. Quarter note = 400 is an extreme tempo, and is very rare. Let's consider that the outer limit of what a very ambitious jazz drummer will ever be asked to perform. We can have a conversation another time about whether a 400 bpm pulse can even be considered a “beat” in any meaningful sense.
You can decide for yourself how to approach very slow tempos. Dig into Shirley Horn's recorded works to get an idea of the practical lower tempo limit in jazz.
A total of 39 markings. Note that if we halve the values from 40-76— 80 and above are doubles of lower values— they increase in single bpm increments from 20-30, then 1.5 beat increments from 30-36, then a two beat increment from 36-38.
That's the answer: 40-76
We can derive all of the values above by doubling the values from 40-76. I've extended that to cover our entire range up to 400 bpm, or 54 markings:
More practical answer: 52-100
Most of us don't play or listen to a lot of tunes in the 40 bpms— it's not real familiar terrain, musically. The 52-100 range is much more common in day to day usage. Double everything twice, and half-time the tempos from 80-100 to get the metronome range plus the faster jazz tempos.
For slow-click practicers
Working with a slow click, regardless of the actual tempo you are practicing, is an extremely effective way of developing your time, so here are the 40-76 tempos halved.
20-30 (1-bpm increments)
31.5 33 34.5 36 38
Most metronomes won't let you use decimal points, so you'll probably have to get these by using the 40-76 numbers, and setting the device to give you downbeats every two beats, and then silence the quarter note pulse. If you're really sick in the head, you could do the 10-19 gamut by setting it do give you downbeats every four beats, and silencing the quarter notes.
Conclusion
So, the real range of tempos is fairly small, if you think in terms of this matrix-type concept. Being aware of it may help you structure your practice, and improve your concept of time and rhythm overall.
It is often said that in a musical ensemble, keeping time is everyone's responsibility.
And in some hypothetical quantum universe or other fantastical musical fairyland, people may actually follow that in practice. In reality, it's all on you, the drummer. You will always be the one blamed when there are problems with the time. You are the receptacle for everyone's problems with the time— both real and imagined— and you will be expected to fix everything.
So your time has to be good, so good that you know it's good, and can speak with real confidence when it comes up.
Here are a few general philosophies and practical tips for improving your time effectively:
Feeling bad
For professionals required to play modern music in a wide variety of tempos, styles and settings, where you are basically expected to maintain metronomic accuracy, I don't believe you can rely on body motion, technique, listening, feeling... “innate groove”... whatever mickey mouse theories people have about the mysterious place good time comes from. It doesn't lie in your muscles, your soul, the motion of the sticks, or the structure of your anatomy.
It resides in your head. The time has to be conceived. You could say it's an intellectual process, I would say it's about awareness. Time awareness can be learned.
I should clarify: there is plenty of indigenous/folkoric music, some of which is extremely rhythmically sophisticated, in which the time may be very much reliant on the things I listed above. That music may be the greatest art in the world, but the demands are different for professional musicians playing the drum set.
Time is the point
In learning to play, we work on a lot of stuff. A whole lot of drumming crap, none of which matters if it isn't servicing the time. Not only do you have to be able to do it in time, you have to use it to construct the time. So we have to resign ourselves to the idea that time is something we have to build and constantly maintain with what we play. There are times where you are allowed or able to take a looser attitude, but you have to be able to do the constructive thing.
The nice part is that when you're playing really good time, little else matters. The crap you wanted to play doesn't seem that great any more. You can be a great drummer with very little drumming crap.
Counting rhythm
Vocalizing is how we make sure our brains get it. It gives you internal concept of the musical idea, which you can then express by playing it on an instrument. Counting the rhythms out loud is a functionally OK way for doing that. I think of it as a low-grade version of the very ancient, sophisticated and effective Indian rhythmic solfege.
For any piece of music you should be able to vocalize the rhythm of the notes only, and the notes plus rests, counting rests as if they are notes. Playing something written out for the drumset, you should be able to count the combined rhythm of the snare and bass drum parts, and the combined rhythm for all of the parts. Personally I only take this to the 16th note level: 1-e-&-a 2-e-&a. At normal tempos I wouldn't count complete rhythms for sixtuplets or 32nd notes— I count those as 8th notes, with no syllables for the subdivisions.
Anticipations
A major place where your time will get messed up is with anticipations— long notes landing right before the beat. You hit a lot of &s of 2 and &s of 4 in jazz, and they tend to rush. When you hit a long note on the & of 4, know where the 1 is, and know how long the space is from the & of 4 to the 2.
1 and 3
Jazz drummers can get almost phobic about the 1 and 3, like they're the white beats that will show everyone how ungrooving you truly are if you acknowledge them. But they're the context for all the super-hip stuff you play. You have to know where they are, and state them accurately, especially if you're doing an Elvin Jones type of cymbal interpretation.
Slow click
Practice with your metronome set to the slowest speed you can handle, regardless of the tempo you're playing. Like a quarter or 1/8th speed. So if you're practicing something at quarter note = 120, set your metronome to 30 or 15. This forces you to conceive the time in your own head, the exact same way you need to do when you're playing music. The metronome just comments periodically to tell you how well you're doing it. I set mine from 15-40 BPM all the time, unless there's a good reason to do something else.
People like to get cute with their metronomes, programming them to drop out for a few measures or whatever. That's just dancing around the real issue, which is ongoing focus on the time. Just learn to deal with a constant slow click.
Memorizing sound
BPM numbers and metronome pulses are lousy media for learning time. Instead, memorize sound. Here: think about the song Kashmir; hear the recording in your head, clap the beat, then check the recording to see how accurately you called it:
Try it with any other recordings you know well. If you wanted to, you could memorize the BPMs for your remembered music catalog, so you can recall the entire functional range of tempos just by thinking about it. Fool your friends.
The more important thing is just to know that this is a thing, learn to trust its accuracy, and begin exploiting it in your playing every day. For example, in playing and recording, I will often memorize the sound of the countoff— not the tempo, the actual sound of the person's voice— or the horn pickups, to check the timing of the tune in progress.
See what you think. These things have all worked very well for me, I think they'll work for you too.
From the Miles Davis album Quiet Nights, with conducted and arranged by Gil Evans. The tune is a Miles/Gil classic, and appears as a bonus track on the 1997 reissue of this album. The version I know the best is on The Individualism of Gil Evans. The transcription is of Tony Williams playing the slow section of the tune starting at 6:28. This was recorded in October 1963, a couple of months before his 18th birthday.
...I'm not trying to awe you with that statistic, by the way. I don't care about anything being awesome, I just want to see some artistry. However old someone is, and how ahead of the time or behind the time, the product is the product. What we have here is a nice intelligent creative performance, that is still very modern. You could say it's an impressionistic interpretation of blues accompaniment.
Tempo is 72 bpm. 8th notes are swung with a triplet feel; there are a couple of spots where I wrote a dotted 8th-16th rhythm, where he disrupts that consistent triplet feel a bit. There is also a double-dotted 8th-32nd rhythm, where he plays a big accent right before the downbeat. He plays a little bit of double time, also with a swing feel— swing the 16th notes where indicated. Approximately like 16th note triplets with the middle note left out.
Dynamics are very subtle throughout. Indicated accents are generally light; housetop accents are rim shots, but not played extremely loud. The hands are played in unison a lot of the time, with a lot of left foot activity. I believe there's more hihat played on the 2 and 4 than I put in the transcription— he plays it very softly at times, and I can only hear it sporadically. I'm probably missing a little of the bass drum, too. There is also a lot of mixed triplet activity, and you often hear a quarter note triplet rhythm on the cymbal (always starting on beat 1 or 3)— either alternating with the left foot, or with the left hand playing 8th note triplets.
This is a long piece, and there are cool sections in 3 and 4 which I'll try to get to transcribing soon.
Practice loop sampled from Breakout, an instrumental jazz odyssey-type number from Black Sabbath's 1978 album Never Say Die. Tempo is quarter note = 57 bpm. Nice and slow, good for getting into my very challenging harmonic coordination whatsis, or the actual harmonic coordination portion of Dahlgren & Fine.
It's actually a fun track, and well-performed. They got some good session horns to play on it. My other Black Sabbath loop is also a lot of fun.
Following up on the subdiving post: you may have noticed that I suggested subdividing 8th notes at slow tempos— not triplets, as you might expect with music like jazz, that is often thought to be triplet-based. When playing ballads I rarely subdivide in triplets, even if the feel is predominantly “triplety”— instead I play off of a compound pulse of triplets and straight, non-swing 8th notes, something like this:
Minus the embellishments, the composite rhythm of the time feel and felt pulse would look like this:
So I am playing off of a compound pulse like a hemiola, generally feeling the top line in my hands, and the bottom line in my left foot— either by tapping my heel, or somehow silently feeling the even 8th note rhythm in my foot motion; rarely by actually playing the 8ths with the cymbals:
Using this more complex skeletal structure on ballads helps keep the time anchored even when you and the group are outwardly playing with a loose feel; and generally, from moment to moment, I (and/or the other players) may be playing either off of the triplets or the 8th notes, and being clear on this structure will prevent the time from getting distorted. It also sets you up for going into double time, which is widely done, to varying degrees.
There should really be no such thing as slow to the person playing the drums. Whatever tempo the listener is hearing, the player is going to multiply it as necessary to make a comfortable, easily-maintainable pulse out of it— subdividing, we call that. Making an easy tempo out of a hard tempo. So if a tune is counted off at 40 beats per minute, you would be thinking and feeling 8th notes or 16th notes (pulses at 80 or 160 bpm, respectively), while playing a feel that states that slow 40 bpm tempo. In the practice room, playing to a metronome setting of 40, you would be feeling a pulse of 80 or 160, while you could be playing an actual tempo of 40, 80, 160, or 320.
Approaching tempo in this way, just the bottom 16 increments on a conventional metronome (40, 42, 44, and so on, up to 76
) will cover all the tempos you reasonably need in actually playing music. Using every other increment is nearly a fine enough gradation for the practice room, since:
40 = 80 = 160
44 = 88 = 176
48 = 96 = 192
52 = 104 = 208
56 = 112 = 224
60 = 120 = 240
66 = 132 = 264
72 = 144 = 288
With just those eight actual settings you are also covering: 80, 88, 96, 104, 112, 120, 132, 144, 160, 176, 192, 208, 224, and so on— above that point, I generally start counting tempos in half notes. The wider numerical gaps at the top of the scale are not important; the real, felt difference between 192 and 208 is the same as that of 96 and 104. If you ever wake up in a panic over always playing 120 and 132, but never 126, you can change things up and practice every other increment starting with 42, for awhile. See if it makes any difference. I don't believe you should be adhering systematically to one set of numbers, anyway; the point is that by subdividing, a fairly small range of tempos will cover the entire spectrum.
In my own practice, I generally try to use the slowest metronome settings possible, often below 40 bpm. This does force you to subdivide accurately, and once you can do that— it's not an advanced skill— it really isn't notably more difficult than using a faster click.
