YouTube solo analyzed

Elaborating on a question I answered on a forum— someone was asking about the playing in the video below. Here is a little bit of analysis of it, and some suggestions about how you should proceed in learning to play like this.  

The drummer sent a transcription of part of this, written as 16th notes in 6/8 time, but it's plainly in 3/4 time. 

Here is the main groove, played after the short little intro fill. He's improvising, it's not played as a strictly repeating thing. 

And the same thing written in 6/8:

To be 6/8, it has to be stated somewhere— either in the drumming or in the context. Maybe he was getting it from the metronome, and playing off of it. If so, we don't hear it, all we have is his drumming, which, with the dotted 8th/16th BD rhythm at the beginning, and SD backbeat on 3, clearly states 3/4. Both those things are contrary to stating 6/8— they're suggestive of a cross rhythm. 

The form is an 8 measure phrase, with fills every two bars, and a long fill at the end of the phrase. Longer fills come more frequently towards the end of the video. The bass drum rhythm at the beginning of the measure is the major unifying thing throughout it. 

The solo activity is mostly alternating singles, with a lot of hand movement— with both hands— and embellishments. There is some right hand lead activity— or you could call them mixed diddle stickings. And a little bit of hands in unison. And a little bit of linear activity with the bass drum, a few single notes inserted in the ongoing 16th texture. There are a few spots where he plays with rhythm a little bit, and he plays across the barline on the longer fills, often leaving some space in the first measure of the new phrase. 

To copy this way of playing, you can't get caught up in the particulars. There are a number of general things (“skills”, I guess) you would have to be fluent improvising with: 

1. Learn the basic groove as above. I've written it as a linear pattern, which is what he plays there, but much of the time he just plays alternating 16ths there. Which fits with the linear pattern, which uses natural sticking.

2. Play alternating 16th notes in 3, moving both hands around the drums, and cymbals. Open ended, practicing the movements. Play over the bass drum rhythm, or add bass drum later.

3. Add dynamics— accents, crescendo/decrescendo. These should follow naturally from the hand movements. You would have to be reasonably fluent with making accents just on a practice pad, reading snare drum solos or exercises. 

4. Add embellishments, broad fill ideas:

• Short 32nd note singles— three notes or five notes
• 16th triplets, one or two
• Mixed 16th stickings— diddles, RH lead
• Flammed 16ths— adding one flam to the ongoing alternating texture
• Solo rhythm with both hands in unison on snare and cymbal

5. Starting and ending fills— fills start loosely, part of the continuing alternating 16ths of the groove. Fills ending with a cymbal accent usually end on the 1, or on the a of 3. Or the & of 3, or on 3. There is one spot where he ends with two crashes, on the a of 3 and & of 1.   

6. Add space— usually that comes after the big phrase ending cymbal accent on 1, or near the 1. The groove returns in the middle of the measure, after a short rest. 

7. Figure out the funny rhythmic things he does early in the solo: 

• At 0:28 he plays two cym/SD accents with bass drum in between. Clue: the first note falls on the a of the beat, the second two fall on the last two partials of an 8th note triplet. 
• At 0:30 he plays something between the snare and high tom. You could get there by fooling around with an 8th note quintuplet, plus some very wide flams. Starting off a downbeat and ending before a downbeat.
• Everything else falls on a 16th grid, except for the obvious 16th note triplets. 

He gets his left hand onto the cymbals enough that it gives the illusion of switching leads, or playing “open handed” or whatever. But the whole thing leads with the right. Just hitting a cymbal with your left hand doesn't change that. 

This is the level you have to deal with things to improvise— broad fluency with basic things. You can't get too hung up in specifics. A transcription would clarify a few things, but the incidental details would obscure what's important. Which is: this is fundamentally pretty simple. 

Solo ideas in 3/4

We'll be seeing more with this format— solo and fill ideas for a certain amount of space between cymbal/bass drum accents. It's the normal frame for fills, but I don't see fill studies written that way often.  

This page has some three beat ideas for soloing in 4/4— they aren't necessarily meant to be played in a 3/4 environment. See the 4/4 phrase at the bottom of the page to see how that works. It's a common thing. 

The ideas themselves are not difficult, the main practice concern will be to get fluent moving them around the drums, and speed, maybe. 

Note that 10 and 11 use a “Bishopdiddle” type sticking, with the diddle up front. Number 8 is sort of a special one— the sticking isn't easy; playing it a lot will be good conditioning. 

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Transcription: Philly Joe trading

Here is Philly Joe Jones trading eights and fours with Bill Evans on Minority, from one of my favorite records, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. It's a good tune to learn. 

I've written just the drum breaks. Transcription begins at 2:51. The tempo is quarter note = 247. 

No tom toms at all here, just snare drum, bass drum, a cymbal, and hihats. A lot of stick shots. There are a few passages of straight 8th notes— at this tempo the 8ths don't swing a whole lot anyway. Note the rhythm in bars 3 and 5. Bar 5 is the “intended” rhythm, in bar 3 he spreads it out a little bit, so the notes are evenly spaced— I've notated it pretty accurately. 

It's basically non-technical— you could do a rudimental sticking on the triplets— and much of it is linear, between the snare drum and bass drum. The rhythms could have been pulled from the book Syncopation, and give a clue for how to look at the phrases in that book— a subject for another time. 

The melodic idea for each break is pretty clear— listen for that, and how he repeats it and changes it, and listen for what sounds like the ending— the last bar, or two bars. The structure is logical, but the structure didn't come first, it's the natural result of thinking musically when you're improvising, and of doing your job, where you set people up to come back in out of your solo. 

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Four on the floor

It is said that, on the drum set, there are snare drummers and cymbal players— I would also say there are bass drummers and hihat players. I've always been a hihat player— meaning, I'll often keep a steady rhythm with my left foot, and do most of my playing with the other limbs. “Bass drummers” will be more likely to do that with the bass drum, especially when soloing, and have most of their activity with the hands. For example: 

That happens in a lot of 60s and post-60s rock drumming: on In A Gadda Da Vita; and Ginger Baker did it, Keith Moon did it, Neil Peart did it on his first big famous solo on Working Man. As prevalent as it was, I've never heard John Bonham do it, which made him seem much more modern than the rest of them. I can't really recall Ringo Starr doing it either, though I wouldn't be surprised if he did. 

I never regarded four on the floor as as a real sophisticated way to play, but I do it at times, with some major points of reference for using it— apart from the obvious swing, shuffle, or disco groove:

The English Beat was big when I was in high school, and I spent the next few years listening to them a lot, and learning Everett Morton's ska beat: 

After Ronald Shannon Jackson's great interview in Modern Drummer, I ran out and bought this record, and listened to it a lot:  

In the interview said some things about the bass drum I never forgot, even as I wasn't using that drum as my main driver:

“See, the most important thing is that foot- the master drum. It's the control drum. It's the center. It's the heartbeat, the relaxed pulse, the more musical tonal center as opposed to the more direct speaking tone- that's what settles the music.

In any ethnic group that employs the drum, you're going to find the large drums, like this Trinidadian drum I have- the long drum; the deep drum. That bottom is where music comes from in most folk cultures. In drums themselves, there have always been master drums- especially in African tribal drumming where there's always that pulse, that center to any social or spiritual event. You can take out the speaking rhythms or the communication on top- that which is portraying the event itself; the master drummer can keep everything going. The pulse, the intention, is still there on the bottom, so you can play the same pulse and change the rhythms on top of it. You can do the same thing on the drumset, when you start with that pulse from the heart- BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. Now everything on top is good; those rhythms are the enhancers- what we emotionally want to say. But if the heartbeat isn't there, things are unstable.”

For a good 10-12 years I was really into Ed Blackwell's drumming, and he would use the bass drum this way in his grooves. On Chairman Mao (by Old And New Dreams) in particular, he brings in the four on the floor in a powerful way after ~ 1:15— I think about that exact thing all the time: 

A more random item, in the 90s I got to catch the Delta Blues guitarist T Model Ford playing in Portland, and his drummer had a really strong bass drum groove:  

In rock and country acts I've been involved with lately, I'll sometimes play the bass drum under tom fills, to give them some more weight. I noticed John Guerin doing that on some of his recordings I've transcribed, and of course Keith Moon did it, and it's very effective. 

“Feathering” four on the floor on the bass drum is a big part of the online discussion of jazz drumming, with people trying to learn a vestigial way of playing the bass drum without doing the first stages of it, where you play a ton of gigs playing it for effect. For example, Philly Joe Jones, working hard as an R&B drummer early in his career, was definitely playing the bass drum to be heard then. As did all the drummers whose careers bridged the swing and bebop eras— Kenny Clarke for example. Then they used it more subtly as they were doing bop. That's a natural, logical progression.  

This ended up being more about my personal stuff than I intended, but there is a larger point here about how we're supposed to notice things— like, notice what you notice; every little particular momentary thing that strikes your ear becomes part of your musical personality. People look for generic rules about what you're supposed to do in a “style” of music, but it's the particulars that matter. 

Cliché control - 5 stroke singles

Another Cliché Control page for learning to solo in jazz, combining stock licks. This time centered around 5-stroke singles: RLRLR or RLRLB. We're squarely in Philly Joe / Art Blakey territory here— and a lot of other people.   

I never practiced anything like this— I've always been helpless to do anything but improvise my solos using stuff worked up through Reed. At times I could have used more of this squared off, pure idiomatic stuff at my disposal.  

Learn all the measures individually, repeating, then play all combinations of measures. A together with B through Z, B together with C through Z, and so on. 

Move the patterns around the drums however you like. Circled notes can be played normally, or as stick shots, or as flams, or with both hands in unison on two drums. Mostly they're meant to be led with the right hand, alternating sticking on the 5s— find some video of Mel Lewis soloing and you'll see what I'm talking about. Good for brighter tempos. In the presence of the 16th notes, many of the 8th notes will not be swung. Straight 8ths happen all the time in jazz, FYI, even in a swing context. Put on some Monk records. 

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World's shortest jazz solo exercise

A quick little item— I know I've posted it before in other forms, maybe this time will be the best. For jazz students, this may be the most useful thing on the site for soloing and filling.  

This is a summary of a very well known right hand lead solo method used with the book Syncopation. You play the rhythms in the book with your right hand, accented, in a swing rhythm, and fill out the triplets quietly with the left hand. Following that rule, the first triplet exercise below is an interpretation of this rhythm— this is background, it doesn't even matter if you get this part:  

So practice this: 

Move your right hand around the toms however you like: 

Also play with your right hand on the cymbal, with bass drum in unison: 

Then improvise— play the RLL portion for as long as you like, transition with a RLR into the LLR pattern, which you can then play as long as you like, going straight back to the RLL sticking whenever you like: 

Add hihat on beats 2 and 4. 

The actual solo method using the book is a little more involved, but this will be extremely useful even without doing that. Practice trading improvised 2s, 4s, 8s, and Blues choruses this way, with all of the moves, and bango, you're a jazz soloist. 

Very occasional quote of the day: Shelly Manne on soloing

“I think you should approach every drum solo the way a good improviser approaches soloing; you shouldn't know what you're going to do until the time comes to do it. Miles Davis said that you should aim a little farther than you think you can reach.”

“The artist should never play and say, "Hey, this is going to knock them out!"”

- Shelly Manne, Modern Drummer interview with Dave Levine, 1981

EZ jazz solo method: alternative triplet stickings

Let's begin expanding the quick and easy jazz solo lesson from the other day— here are some alternative triplet stickings you can use with it. You'll recall that it consisted of a “stock” pattern element and a “reading” pattern element— use these stickings with the reading element, using pp. 14-15 of Syncopation.

Wherever there is more than a single beat of triplets, substitute these for the repeating RLL or RRL sticking. Of course you could also do the triplets with an alternating sticking, which I didn't bother writing out.

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A quick and easy jazz solo lesson

UPDATE: Download link works now!

This is an easy, non-technical method for learning jazz solos/breaks/trading, which I devised in lessons with an older Skype student. It involves a few basic patterns, and several easy practice methods to use with the book Progressive Steps to Syncopation. This should work well for students who are new to jazz, and don't know how to begin soloing, and will create a good foundation for development of more sophisticated forms of soloing.

I named two of the stock patterns at the top of the page “Philly Joe” and “Billy Higgins” to have a convenient reference for them in teaching this— I notice that each of them plays those things quite a bit. As do a lot of other people.

We're going to approach this like the United States Marines [stands up, salutes flag], quickly grabbing as much musical terrain as we can, bypassing whatever parts are hard for you, and mopping them up later. Dumb analogy, but now that I think of it, it does sum up my whole approach to everything. We want to be fluent with the major structures without getting hung up on technical concerns. Do the following, swinging the 8th notes:

1. Play the warmups, repeating.

2. Learn each of the seven interpreted methods while reading from Syncopation— play lines 1-15 plus the long exercise on the indicated pages.

3. Then play the practice phrases:

• One measure of a stock pattern / one measure of a reading pattern
• Two measures time / one measure stock pattern / one measure reading pattern
• Trade all combinations of time / stock patterns / reading patterns in 1s / 2s / 4s

The goal is to improvise your solos, so I don't believe there's a need to learn this rigidly by the numbers. Once you can recognize and handle all the basic ideas, play them in time, and move them around the drums, while keeping the basic form together— trading 1s/2s/4s, you're fine.

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Philly Joe solo lesson

In that last Philly Joe Jones transcription— his solo on Sub City, with Bud Powell— I noted a pattern of using his 8th note bass drum phrases to break up the mainly-snare drum passages. It's actually an easy way to modernize an old fashioned rudimental snare drum oriented approach to soloing. I'm more whole-instrument oriented, so I'm coming at it from the opposite direction, trying to learn to use my snare drum chops on the drum set without feeling like a pure caveman.

So let's devise a practice method from this. In all the examples I'm giving a rough hands part and bass drum part only. You should be moving your hands around the drums, varying accents and stickings to make something exciting and musical out of it.

Here are some of Philly Joe's 8th note lines which included the bass drum:

It would be easy to devise some practice phrases, alternating these patterns with improvised soloing. For example:

It's probably wise to practice that way, with everything very clear cut, always changing ideas on the 1. It's easy for people to follow. But I suggest being looser with it, using those types of phrases as a starting point, remembering that you are under no obligation to match them exactly.

For example, this is not a real exciting idea:

These are more dynamic ways of playing the same basic phrase:

So we're looking for ways to introduce some space, and to not always play to the 1. I think it's best to work that out in the course of actually playing the drums, but some people may need to write out some possibilities first. Beyond the scope of this little practice formula, it will help to think about having more than one way to phrase and accent— and start and finish— any basic solo idea. 

Soloing on a form

don't let this happen to you

“My idea of a drum solo is that you play like you sing. It comes from different things you listen to. And the beauty is always in the simple things.” —Kenny Clarke

This is part of a question came up on the Cymbalholic forum:

I'm supposed to solo over the form and I should know where I am in the tune so that I can get in and out of the solo in the right sort of way. But I'm not nailing it. I'm losing track of myself and the tune.

He went on to ask for some “resources” for learning to do this. I'm not aware of any. It's really a thing that happens in your head, at your drums. Contemporary drumming is very enamored with the idea of muscle memory— that your body can just figure out how to do everything great if you do a lot of calisthenics. Maybe that kind of conditioning works for paradiddles, it doesn't work with higher order functions like keeping track of a larger context while playing creatively on the drums.


It's about awareness
Everybody knows the Charlie Parker quote:

You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

The problem is, everyone's in a rush to forget what they never knew in the first place. Playing without thinking at all is a false goal; or rather, it's a rare thing— it's a very special occasion when you can play that way. Most of the time you have to know what you're doing. As I've said elsewhere, it's not about playing “intellectually”, it's about awareness.



Know the tune
You do have to know the tune, and you can't forget it while you play. Be able to sing it, however badly, and count through the form. Over time it takes less effort to be aware of the tune while you play. At first you have to prioritize thinking about the tune over what you're playing.


Start from nothing
Can you sing the tune by itself, while not playing anything? Can you count through the form without getting lost? Then you can solo without getting lost. Sing or count, and add things on the drums as you are able, without forgetting where you are in the form. You'll have to start with single notes, on downbeats, leaving a lot of space, and build from there.


Start from time
Can you play time and comp while singing the tune, or counting through it, without getting lost? Do the same thing as above— play along, and do more soloistic things as you are able, without losing track of the tune. The time itself is your solo, so you don't even have to do that much. Going from time to playing soloistically is much easier if you do the next thing:


Practice Reed-type methods
The Reed methods teach you how to play a lot of different ideas accompanying a jazz-type melodic line, and to integrate those ideas with each other, moving seamlessly from time to soloing. You can then solo by directly interpreting the rhythm of the tune, or by improvising your own lines. Practicing that way gives you the world's easiest transition from practicing to real world playing. This is what I've been trying to tell you all this time.


Think in phrases
If you can improvise in 4/4 without losing track of the 1, you can then begin thinking in 2, 4, and 8 bar phrases. Once you can play 8 measures without getting lost, awareness of the larger form becomes a simpler matter, learning to play blues, then 8 bar phrases in an AB form, and then an AABA form, and beyond.


Musical significance of the sections
The different parts of a form have to have some musical significance to you. Blues is eight bars of “free time” plus a four bar turnaround. A 16-bar AB form is simply a matter of 8 bars solo / 8 bars contrasting solo. AABA is 8+8 bars of blowing time, a contrasting bridge, and an end. For 32 bar tunes with a tag (e.g. All The Things You Are), you can do that same basic thing, and remember the extra four bar ending.


Awareness on longer forms
If you listen to a lot of blues tunes, you should know what the turnaround, the last four bars of the form, feels like. If you listen to a lot of tunes based on I Got Rhythm, which is an AABA form, you know what it feels like when you hit the bridge. Both of those things are very common, particular musical feelings, which you can express as a change of feeling in your playing. It takes a little more imagination to distinguish the last A of Rhythm changes tunes from the other As; you have to keep a general feeling of this is the last A while you play; that section is dedicated to setting up a return to the top of the form. On an AABA with a tag, you do the same thing, but then use the 4 bar tag to set up the top of the form really clearly.

So you have to be able to create contrasting phrases when you play; you have to be able to sound like you're at the top of the form; you have to be able to play something that sounds like an ending, that sets up the band to come back in. As you listen more and play more, you'll get more ideas of how to express those things in your playing, and more ideas about the broad meaning of different parts of the form, and different directions you can go with them.


Tunes to start with 
It's a good idea to start with tunes that are commonly played, that are rhythmically active, and very singable. For example:
Blues: Bags' Groove, Sonnymoon For Two, Mr. PC, Things Ain't What The Used To Be, Sandu. Listen to John Coltrane's album Coltrane Plays The Blues, which has several tunes that are simply an 8 bar vamp plus a turnaround. 
AABA: I Got Rhythm, or anything based on it: Ornithology, Scrapple From The Apple, Oleo, Rhythm-a-ning. I like playing over Bye Bye Blackbird; it's easy to hear the last A as the end of the form. Don't Get Around Much Any More is an easy medium tempo AABA tune. Doxy is a 16 bar AABA tune with four bar sections.
AABA with a tag: All The Things You Are is really ABCD, or A-A1-B-A2-tag. It may the most common tune of this type that you will play.

Syncopated melodic solo - 01

Here I've composed a syncopated, non-technical, four-tone melodic solo for drum set. It is through-composed, 36 bars long, in eight bar phrases with a four bar tag.

Play this with the snares off, and pencil in your own stickings as necessary. This will sound best if the drums are tuned for a nice tonal sound. Play it at a moderate volume and let the accents guide you in shaping the phrases, keeping in mind that though the piece is written without section dynamic markings, that doesn't mean all the notes should be exactly the same volume. Try not playing any two notes in a row at the same volume... subtly. Play the crescendos as self-contained within their measure— get a little softer at the beginning, build, and then subito return to the original volume after. I wasn't swinging the 8th notes when I wrote it, but you can swing them if you want.

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Very occasional quote of the day: soloing

“My idea of a drum solo is that you play like you sing. It comes from different things you listen to. And the beauty is always in the simple things.”

— Kenny Clarke, from 1984 Modern Drummer interview by Ed Thigpen

Maximizing syncopation rhythms

This is something I was doing with a Skype student recently. We're working on jazz solo vocabulary, currently getting fluent with common jazz rhythms using basic drum set orchestrations— developing a basic Billy Higgins/Frankie Dunlop-like solo vocabulary (the non-technical end of their soloing, anyway) using my simple solo method from a couple of weeks ago. This is an exercise to get the most real vocabulary from the one-line exercises in Syncopation (pp. 34-37), by isolating parts of the rhythms.

These examples will use this line from Syncopation— p. 34, line 3:

Which we would generically play like this, on the snare drum, with the hihat played on 2 and 4:

First just play one measure of the pattern, stopping on the following 1, while continuing the hihat through the rest:

Or you could leave off the 1:

The first three notes of the pattern are easy enough to isolate:

And the whole ending of the measure, with or without the 1:

The middle of the measure:

Don't always front load the two-measure phrase— put the space at the beginning sometimes:

You should be using the basic orchestrations the whole time you do this, mixing them up freely. Do this with perhaps a dozen lines of exercises from the book— that should be enough to teach you this way of thinking, so you can begin improvising naturally. All of the rhythms resulting from this system occur other places in Syncopation, so it's not necessary to work this through too rigorously just to learn rhythms.

A simple solo method

Here's a simple, non-technical solo method I was just working on with a student...


...a SKYPE student... did you know I teach lessons via Skype? I do. Anything you ever have questions about on the blog, I'm available to do a private lesson to work it out with you. Shoot me an email.


...this is very similar to some other things we've been doing here lately, like the Stick Control applications on the drumset. Basically identical in fact, except the Stone thing is geared towards funk and the ECM feel, and this is more about basic solo vocabulary in jazz— and rhythmic interpretation for ensemble playing in general. Basic, non-timekeeping rhythmic functionality on the drum set.

We'll use the one-line exercises starting on page 34 of Progressive Steps to Syncopation— current edition. Here's one measure of line 1 from on p. 34:

As I always do with this book, we're going to re-interpret the stems-up part, and ignore the stems-down part. We'll use a very common method for orchestrating that rhythm on the drum set based on long notes and short notes; short notes are untied 8th notes; long notes are everything else— tied 8th notes, quarter notes, and dotted quarter notes. Play the short notes on the snare drum with your left hand, and the long notes on the bass drum:

First play the cymbal (any cymbal, with your right hand) in unison with all of the notes:

Then play the cymbal only on the long notes— the bass drum notes:

Next play the short notes with both hands in unison, and long notes on bass drum only:

This is all simple enough that you can easily begin moving your hands around the drums and cymbals, and begin thinking about the melodic shape of what you're doing.

Let's look at the line 4 exercise:

The top line played on snare drum and bass drum, according to the short note/long note system, playing the cymbal along with all notes:

Then cymbal on the long notes only:

Short notes with both hands in unison— these unison notes can be played on any two drums, or on the snare drum with any cymbal:

Where there are two or more running 8th notes, you could also play them with an alternating sticking, with the hands on the same drum, or on different drums:

When doing that, I prefer to play the right hand on the &s, and the left hand on the beat. You could also do the alternating sticking on the cymbal-on-long-notes way.

Play through the one-line exercises with all of these interpretations, then begin working on the long syncopation exercises beginning on page 38. Move the hand parts of the exercises around the drums and cymbals, and change from one interpretation to the next without stopping. Then improvise your own solos while trading 4s or 8s.

Listen to some 50s-60s Roy Haynes (Out of the Afternoon, Misterioso by Thelonious Monk), Frankie Dunlop (the tune Jackie-ing, and the albums Criss Cross, or Monk's Dream by Thelonious Monk), and Billy Higgins (Art Deco by Don Cherry) to hear these types of things played in actual music.

Download this one page list of basic orchestrations if you haven't already memorized them.

Very occasional quote of the day: Max Roach - how you build a solo

Max Roach by Jean-Michel Basquiat

“What makes a piece an art piece is design. Design.

If you play any instrument, if you don’t create design…. If the artist doesn’t know how to utilize space and sound, and the dynamics of soft and loud — all the little things — and repitition and sequential dealing with all the rules that make up what we know as an art piece — and then some more –then it’s not [an art] piece anyway. Whether you’re playing an instrument of determinate or indeterminate pitch.

I hear some people who run up-and-down the piano and it’s not musical. All I can say is, “Well, he’s got good technique.” But I never say he’s playing music, or [that] he’s creating some design.

So when I build a solo it’s design within the structure of something, sometime. Basically it’s design. Like creating a poem, a painting, or anything else. It’s how you use [design] to set up certain things.

Space is important and dynamics are important. And things like sequences or sequential things are important. And how you relate to certain timbres on the [drum]set itself is important.

And that’s how you build a solo.”

- Max Roach, interview by Scott K. Fish

There's more— hit the link, go read the whole thing. Be visiting Fish's blog all the time— it's full of great stuff.

Barry Altschul on playing melodically

This is an excerpt from a pretty amazing 1981 Modern Drummer article by Barry Altschul, in which he discusses the drummer's relation to tunes, form, and melody, and playing melodically: 

It is [...] the drummer's responsibility to know where the chord changes fall in the tune, and the song form. Knowing the names of the chords isn't necessary, but you should know where the chords change, and when a chorus is over.

Drums are a musical instrument and melody can be implied. Many drummers seem to get lost within a tune. If this happens to you, you should be able to find yourself by listening to the bass player. But, in order to know where he is, you must be familiar with the tune yourself.

Short of studying a melodic instrument, there are ways to achieve this familiarity. First, you must listen! Listen to tunes, sing them, learn the chord changes. Listen to saxophone, piano, and trumpet players. Learn to improvise around the melody of the tune by singing or whistling. Hear the chord changes while you're improvising.

A good method for accomplishing this, and one that will also help your conception and technique, is to learn a saxophone solo. Take a Lester Young solo, for example. Sing the solo away from the record. (The actual notes are not as important for the drummer as is the contour and the rhythms of the solo.) Tap the solo out on the snare drum. Then play it as if you are accompanying a band, with your right hand playing steady time, two and four on the hi-hat, and the solo between your left hand and bass drum! Interpret the sax solo as if it were a drum solo. You'll soon start to develop a melodic approach. You'll also become familiar with tunes and forms, and become aware of what the melodic instrumentalists are actually doing.

To imply melody, sit down at the drum set and make one sound. Then make another sound. Don't be afraid to be unconventional in your approach to making that sound or in the sound itself. Any sound imaginable can be used if it's used in a musical way. Do this again and again until you have explored all the sounds your set will give you. Concentrate on doing the same thing on each part of your set. A cymbal, then your snare drum, another cymbal, your bass drum. Even your stands and whatever else you use! If you want more sounds, use percussion instruments.

After you've found your sounds, utilize them when you are playing the saxophone solo we talked about earlier. Play the contour of the sax solo with your sounds to imply the melody. The only “notes” a drummer has are the high, low and middle pitched sounds. These must be related to in a melodic way with a drummer's own conception. Once this is achieved, melody can be implied. Melodies are also rhythmic, so to play in a melodic way, think that way!

Todd's tom tom thing — part 1

This is something that has come up organically in my own playing, which I've been trying to get a handle on more systematically— we saw a little bit of this before with my “quasi-African” tom lick. Mainly, we're combining moving around the drums with sound/articulation changes with the left hand. This is mainly a soloing thing, but the kind of fluency we'll be developing should generally apply when playing Latin styles that are mainly on the drums, like a rhumba, or calypso; or when you want a texture change on a Latin tune, like during a bass solo.

This sort of thing looks like hell on the page, so we'll break it down as much as possible:

Play the snare drum with the snares off. The left hand will be playing the snare drum normally, rim clicks, rim shots, and ghost notes. The right hand moves between the snare drum (played normally) and floor tom. Once you can do the basic moves, you can begin to play with your sound— adding some accents, changing the quality of your rim shots, and experimenting with the way your left hand muffles the drum during the rim clicks. If you want to use your feet, you can play quarter notes (or dotted quarters in 12/8) on the hihat, or with both feet, to start.

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Getting lost

Or not.

Here are a few pointers on a subject with which I am all too intimately familiar: getting lost while soloing over over a form, and while reading:

SOLOING

First, whatever various hells break loose during your solo, you can always just cue the band back in at the end. Set them up by playing something that sounds like a last A (assuming an AABA form)- going back to playing time would suggest that- and make significant eye contact with the rest of the band. If they're not deliberately hanging you out to dry, they'll come in at the end of the 8 bars, especially if you give them a nice bonehead-simple lead-in on the last measure. If they don't follow you, you can play eight more bars and then verbally count them back in. They would have to really have it in for you to ignore that.

You do also have to know the tune. Be able to sing the melody badly, know the length and structure of the form (12 bar blues, AABA, 32 bars + tag, 16+16, etc), and know the standard arrangement, if there is one (e.g., the repeated figure on Stolen Moments, or the stops in Work Song). At the very least you have to know the form.

Something you can do at the actual moment of getting lost is to just guess where the nearest reference point is; so if you get lost in the middle of the second A, then make a big downbeat and change the texture someplace that could plausibly be the beginning of the bridge, and carry on with the form from there. Who knows, you might even guess right. Even if you don't, most of the band will suspect that they counted wrong, and half of the rest of them aren't even paying attention. The actual cats will know that you blew it, and recovered. It doesn't matter.

More helpful tips after the break:

Basic solo vocabulary with Syncopation

Hey, it's been awhile since I've posted anything downloadable of my own, and you don't want to hear me prattle on about cymbals and crap, so here's a basic solo vocabulary builder I've been working through with a couple of students. Use lesson 6 out of the new edition of Syncopation, or pp. 14-15 from the old version:

You have to apply the variations with a vengeance to make these sound like anything. Especially vary the accents- give the thing some shape. 

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