Getting around the drums: the ultra basics

A quick little page of stuff on getting around the drums with one hand, and both hands. In the first part I've basically written out the collection of tom moves we use with the Pages o' Coordination, including the Stick Control-derived method. With that method, you use the Rs and Ls in the book patterns to indicate one drum or another. So if you're calling the R the low tom, and the L the high tom, a patter of RRLL would have you play low-low-high-high. Or if you call them snare and low tom, respectively, you would play snare-snare-low-low. Take a look at the examples on the page, divine the principle, and apply it.

On the bottom half of the page we've got patterns for getting around the drums when playing two or three notes per drum. As you'll see from attempting the patterns labeled “awkward”, to get around smoothly you need to be strategic in how you do your moves.

Play the one-handed exercises many times, with either hand. You can apply the same moves to the left hand part of any pattern at all— just play one note (or one double) on each drum, as indicated in the patterns on this page. Play the two-handed patterns with an alternating sticking, starting with the right hand— if you start them with the left, they mostly won't work.

If you want to add the feet, you can play quarter notes or half notes with the left foot, or use any ostinato you want.

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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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Additional tom moves

If like me you've been working the hell out of the pages o' coordination (me, I've been hitting the Afro 6/8, the 6/8 Rumba clave, and the page of Mozambique) you may be getting a little bored with the old Joe Cusatis-sourced tom moves I always tell you to do with them— to me they can begin to feel a little formulaic. To take things in another direction, I've started doing moves based on patterns from the beginning of Stick Control, playing the Rs on one sound, and the Ls on another, so this Stone exercise:

Could be played like this (or on any two drums, in any order):

So revoicing the snare part from this pattern, from our original Elvin's Afro-Waltz page:

Would look like this:

It would be easy to take this way too far: on Stick Control pp. 5-7 there are 72 patterns × 3 sets of drums to play them on (snare/high tom, snare/floor tom, high tom/floor tom), × 2 drums to begin the pattern on. So, you have to use some restraint if you're going to get through a page of exercises in a reasonable amount of time; there's no need to go through every mother-loving pattern on every combination of drums. I usually just do all of our old moves, on all combinations of drums, plus 2-4 Stone-derived moves, played between two drums only. Whatever moves you do, it shouldn't take more than half an hour to work through one of the pages— assuming you can already play it just keeping your LH on the snare drum, that is.

You can probably safely limit yourself to these four-note patterns:

RRLL (or RLLR)
RRRL
RLLL

And maybe these eight-note patterns:
RLRR LRLL
RLLR LRRL
RRRR LLLL (or RRLL LLRR)

And you could also do these Stone-like three- and six-note patterns:
RRL
RLL
RRR LLL
RLRRLL (or RLLRRL)

Those alternate patterns might sit a little more-interestingly on the drums than their formers.

Of course, you can always just improvise the moves, but the point of doing these abstract patterns is to make you play some things you might not otherwise play. The moves can also form some long counter-melodies, which definitely forces you to concentrate, and opens some mental doors.

Tom moves revisited

I've been using these moves around the drums a lot in my own practice-- if you've been working with the Elvin's Afro Waltz series, you probably have too-- and have evolved them slightly, so I thought I'd share that with you. As you can see here, I've added some inversions of the main moves:

Key:
S = snare drum (normal stroke, or rim click)
H = high tom
L = low tom

Between two drums:
S H S H / H S H S
S L S L / L S L S
H L H L / L H L H

Away from/back to one drum:
S H S L / H S L S / L S H S
H S H L / S H L H / L H S H
L S L H / S L H L / H L S L

Down / up the drums, or clockwise / counterclockwise: 
S H L / H L S / L S H
S L H / L S H / H S L

The reason for the extra inversions is that when doing a moving part with the same number of notes per measure as there are in the move, the resulting pattern will start on the same drum every measure. So, you may want to explore some other possibilities. It takes more time to do the extra patterns, so I do them when I want to hear something else happen musically with a pattern; I don't necessarily do them routinely. There's certainly no need to do them when the pattern starts on a different drum every measure/repeat.

One more thing: You could do these with one note only per drum, but I will generally put doubles or multiples on one drum, and do the moves when there's enough time to make them easily. So, this pattern from the first installment of the Elvin thing:

...would be played like this when using the SHL move: