Guy's cowbell beats

A page for a student, age 12, who bought a cowbell, and didn't know what to do with it. Basically two kinds of beats— basic rock beats, and a kind of Latin-rock beat with a cinquillo rhythm on the bell. We covered a number of these verbally in the lesson— several of them were his idea— this develops them further. 

Get the pdf, then get the vibe by listening to some Def Leppard: 

And Deep Purple:  

Tresillo unit

For a couple of weeks I've been working with an area of stuff covering several different styles— grooves with a tresillo rhythm, or part of it, in the bass drum. I've been polishing it for a recording session today. 

That bass drum rhythm occurs most famously in New Orleans drumming, Songo and other Caribbean styles, and Baiao. All different things from different countries, but with jazz groups things have a way of getting mashed up. The chart we're recording is marked “samba”, but the bass line is based on this type of rhythm, and nothing else about the piece is particularly samba-like.   

We have there: 

Systems for New Breed
I've been doing a few ostinato variations with the reading in The New Breed— which I've decided I like a lot. The reading portion of that book is different enough from Syncopation to be worth doing— more space, fewer runs of multiple notes, and of course 16th notes are the main subdivision. 

The ostinatos are played by the right hand on a cymbal, bass drum, and hihat played with the foot. On a couple of them the right hand moves to the floor tom. 

Subtractive method
Practicing from the book Syncopation, I've been running a subtractive thing I detailed before (the item at that link would actually be good to include in this unit)— voicing the melody rhythm in the book corresponding with a BSSB-SBBS pattern. 

Songo variations
A couple of different songo grooves, with fills, making variations on the fly. 

Street beat / alternating singles
Played on either the snare drum or hihat, varying the accents/articulations, with a move to the floor tom.  

Get the pdf

And here's one loop I've been using, sampled from Eddie Palmieri— Azucar, from the album Azucar Pa' Ti:

And another loop, a little faster, a baiao groove from Airto— Papo Furado, from the album Seeds On The Ground: 

Rhythm cycles

Here's a page to print out and staplegun to the wall by your drums: a summary of some major practice rhythms, and their inversions. Sometimes you don't need a readable page, you just need a quick reference to glance at. I should probably expand this and make a poster out of it. I'll certainly be updating it. 

Includes a couple of simple rhythms that don't have a name, and the Charleston rhythm, tresillo, cinquillo, three different rhythms in 3/4, played across the barline in 4/4. 

Play these as independent rhythms along with an ostinato, or in a Reed-style interpretation, or as ensemble rhythms/kicks— at the bottom are some practice phrases for that. Phrases 1 and 3 are good for a kick-type phrase, phrase 2 suggests a rhythm section figure, a la the tune Equinox. Plug in whichever practice rhythm you want in place of the example rhythm, of course. 

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Charleston inversions

Kicking off 2023 with a library item— file this with the pages of tresillo/cinquillo inversions, and this page. The Charleston rhythm is a form of the tresillo rhythm that found its way into mainstream American popular music in the 20s, that we use a lot in jazz drumming today, mainly as a comping rhythm on the snare drum or bass drum. Here I've written out inversions of it, starting on each beat in the measure, and their &s.   

On the second page there are some short exercises combining all of the inversions— in effect they're meter-within-meter phrases, but the idea is just to be able to follow each version of the rhythm some different ways, to not always have to space it the same way.  

Get the pdf

This has come up a lot lately, when people talk about rhythm in jazz— the Charleston rhythm. It's funny how all at once everybody starts saying the same stuff.  Nobody ever told me about it, I just heard it on a Mingus record and it was obviously a thing to play. And I had to play it as an actual thing playing dance music. 

Idris's clave

A page of beats based on a snare drum rhythm used a lot by Idris Muhammad. It's a sort of one-bar clave, an inversion of the rhythm commonly called tresillo, starting on beat 3. I've set it to a cymbal rhythm, and added some bass drum rhythms and ghost notes on the snare drum:

Check out my grooves o' the day of Muhammad's grooves using this rhythm. My other posts on the tresillo rhythm are also closely related to this.

Get the pdf

Tresillo rhythms - EZ rock orchestrations

UPDATE: pdf link works now. I'm doing too many things this week. I've been running some students through this, and it sounds good. A more accessible version of my funk control series.

Some basic rock orchestrations for the tresillo inversions I posted recently. It's normal to practice these without writing them out, so learn the idea, and as soon as you can, apply it while you read the straight rhythm from the original page. But when first learning the system, it goes faster for some students to see it written. See my Reed funk drill, rock drill, and Funk Control posts for explanation of the basic concepts— and for the next level of stuff to do with these ideas. Or, hell, just email me for a Skype lesson.

This is all closely related to things we've covered many times before, but I'm trying to hone in on a non-technical funk drumming method based on these rhythms, and the 3:2 polyrhythm.

Some of the things happening are: fast 4 feel, 2 feel, 2 feel with added ghost notes on the snare drum, 4 or 2 feel with bass drum added on 1 (if not already present), practice rhythm played on cymbal and bass drum, with snare drum filling in— alternating sticking, and RH-cym/LH-snare. The ghost notes are usually added on the 1 or 4, by playing a RL. I'm calling them ghost notes, but you don't have to play them extremely quietly.

Memorize all of those ways of interpreting and modifying a simple written rhythm— know them well enough to start thinking of them as obvious things to do.

Get the pdf

Tresillo inversion combinations

A library item for fairly hardcore individuals: two measure combinations of all of the tresillo inversions from the item at that link. This whole area of rhythm is extremely fertile to me— it's all familiar stuff, but I've never seen a really systematic study of it; and the further I get into doing that, the more connections I see with drumming as it exists in the wild. I'm working out a complete new system for funk drumming based on it, that should be very hip, and also very functional and accessible to players of all levels.

To save space I've written only two measures of each combination, and haven't given duplicate combinations where the same two measures are simply reversed. So you should play all of these starting on the first and second measure of the pattern— especially if you're making a funk groove out of them.

You can also use these as jazz comping rhythms for snare drum or bass drum, or as left hand parts for a bossa or samba, or even as bass drum variations for a baiao-type groove. And of course there's a lot more you can do.

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Tresillo and cinquillo inversions

I've got way too much painfully unfinished stuff in the docket right now; about a dozen long written pieces languishing in my drafts folder, some in-depth practice materials in development, an ambitious new book project, a cymbal tour to Germany coming up, for which I should be writing emails...

So here's a something easy for me: a couple of pages of on the tresillo and cinquillo rhythms, with all of their inversions. I refer to them by their Cuban names for convenience, but they are extremely useful rhythms for any kind of music. You already have these in your copy of Syncopation, but they're spread out over three pages, with a lot of other rhythms, and not in any particular order. Putting these in logical order on two pages, maybe we can have a little more clarity in learning about these two important rhythms.

Use these the way you use the book Syncopation. Basically do anything with them. Another nice thing about having the variations all together is that all of the interpretations/orchestrations you do will be of equal difficulty, with the same type of flow.

Get the pdf

Three-note syncopation rhythms

Here are a couple of pages of syncopation rhythms in 4/4. Most of them can already be found in Progressive Steps to Syncopation, in one form or another, but sometimes I want to have certain things grouped together. In this case, I was playing along and I wanted to see all the variations,  displacements, and similar rhythms to a Cuban tresillo rhythm— all possible three-note rhythms in 4/4, with a quarter note or greater spacing, on an 8th note subdivision.

You can of course do any of the usual practice practice routines with these pages, in 4/4 or 2/2. I wanted them to use as independence rhythms for the left hand and bass drum, with a Mozambique cymbal rhythm, moving the rhythms around the drums. You could use them as jazz comping rhythms on the snare and/or bass drum; or as bass drum variations in a samba, bossa nova, or baiao, alternating measures with the usual rhythm; or for bass drum independence practice in other Cuban/salsa/Caribbean styles like mambo,  guaguanco, or songo.

Like I said, I see many of these rhythms as variations on the familiar tresillo rhythm (written on line 5), with an accented & of 2, which occurs in Cuban music, New Orleans music, and Brazilian music; rhythms with a quarter note on beat 2 (or 2 and 3) relate to the 2 side of a clave rhythm; rhythms with a note on 3 (or 3 and 1) relate to a samba surdo part— all the kinds of connections you need to make to play creatively in those styles.

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