Good lord, that's a deep pocket...

Here's Levon Helm— if the question on your mind after seeing this is not “my God, how do I make my time sound like that?”, you may need to reexamine your priorities as a drummer...



In re: singing and playing, the principle is the same as for things we do in just drumming: it's more a matter of coordination than of “independence.”

(h/t to Jake Feinberg and Drum Talk TV)

A few items for sale

Just FYI, I have a few things for sale right now:

Pearl 12"x7" snare drum — $150.00
It's a  “popcorn” size drum, but it's a real drum, well put together, with a nice, fat (8-ply?), maple shell. I used this on my last record, tuned low— great for getting that timbre without the pitch going way too low. Click through to my record Travelogue in the sidebar to give it a listen. Looks great.

SOLD - 20" A. Zildjian Deep Ride — $150.00
Late 70s vintage, with ink, and almost new looking. 8 rivets that must have been factory-installed. The Deep Rides are heavier cymbals, but with qualities you wouldn't expect. T. Bruce Wittet describes them thusly:

A marvelous low-profile, mystical ride cymbal that offered the articulation inherent in a heavier cymbal with the dark utterance of the Turkish K. [...] The Deep Ride was in a class all its own and while Zildjian figured the onslaught of new American-made Ks would render it redundant…they didn’t. The Zildjian Deep Ride confirmed my suspicion that a cymbal could be at once heavy in weight, full in tone.

It's a cool cymbal, but I've got a few too many heavier 20s around right now...

14" A. Zildjian New Beat hihats — $120.00
Early 70s. They're New Beats— as classic as they come. About in the middle of the weight range, relative to other New Beats.

SOLD - 20" Paiste Sound Formula Full Ride — $130.00
1996. Drilled for six rivets by Gregg Keplinger. A reasonable poor man's Sound Creation Dark Ride, if you want to try rocking that somewhat-dark, cutting vibe without spending $500. I used this on my 2012 Europe tour; it's on the heavier side of medium— I guess in the 2500g range?—  but lush-sounding, true to its name. Gregg Keplinger drilled this for eight rivets for me.

Ludwig 17"x12" marching tenor drum — $100.00
Olive badge, early 70s vintage? Gold/black/gold sparkle, with the long, one-piece lug casings. I was meaning to slap some bass drum spurs on this and make it the foundation of a micro-bop set, but I never got around to it. The 17" heads are apparently not as hard to get hold of as you might think— you will have to order them.

Let's say $30 shipping for the Ludwig, $20 for anything else, and $30 for two items. Reach me via email, in the sidebar, if you have any questions, or would like to arrange a purchase.

Very occasional quote of the day: inspiration

“Inspiration is for amateurs— the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
—painter Chuck Close

(h/t to Michael Shrieve)

Snare drum workout in 5/4 — accented 8th notes with flams/drags

Another flam accent/flam drag-oriented snare drum workout, which is a good companion to this one in 6/8 and this one in 2/4— this will be a little difficult if you haven't mastered those first, actually.

Sticking is alternating, plus the drags and flams, obviously. Do play them starting with either hand. Observe the dynamics carefully— there are some unaccented flams which you'll need to be careful with; on the accented drags in ex. 17-18, accent the first note of the double only. As with all flam studies, the grace notes need to be very small— around 1".

Get the pdf

Transcription: Ivan Conti — Nome Dele E Joan

Here's more from Brazilian drummer Ivan Conti, of the band Azymuth. The tune is a moderate-tempo samba, Nome Dele E Joan, from the band's 2002 album Partido Novo. I just transcribed a few bars from the first little B section:

If you've been reading our new book Playing Samba and Bossa Nova (Kindle | print), you'll notice several things I mentioned there, starting with the set up at the beginning, on the bass drum— you hear Brazilian drummers do that a lot, Americans, not so much. He hits it lightly here. The rhythms he plays on the hihat should feel familiar if you've played through the practice rhythms in the book; the left hand is not playing an independent rhythm, it's just following the hihat, partially in unison. Notice how he handles the little ensemble figures— he plays the figure exactly on the drums, or drums and cymbal, without the bass drum continuing the groove underneath.

Get the pdf

“How can I understand Elvin Jones?”

This is a question that came up on the Drummerworld forum— Elvin Jones's playing is quite advanced in a way that inexperienced listeners may be slow to figure out, and that defies explanation. The way you go about understanding artists like that is by getting all the records you can find/afford with him on them, and listening to them a lot, and maybe doing some transcribing. And you see them play live, if possible. That's all anyone else ever did. Sometimes you can get some insight by talking to them, but usually not— at least not the insight you were looking for. But here are a few stylistic things that are thought of as being pretty “him”:

• He has a strong tendency to phrase in 3/4, even when playing in 4/4. 
• His cymbal pattern tends to emphasize the “skip” note— the note on the & of 2 and 4, in a regular jazz ride pattern.
  
  
  
  
• That emphasis on the ride pattern, combined with the phrasing in 3/4 means his playing often has a strong pull towards a dotted-quarter note rhythm, regardless of what meter he's in. 
• He tends to fill out the texture with the snare drum, bass drum, and sometimes hihat, to make a constant stream of triplets. 
• He does play “triplety”, but there is also a pull towards 16th notes; so some phrases that sound like he's just playing sloppy/loose, is really the rhythmic grid shifting between triplets and 16th notes. 
• He tends to shift his accenting around dramatically; over the course of a phrase, he'll accent in different places in the measure, in a different sequence, than a very mainstream bop player might. Here's an example, from our upcoming Book of Intros— he plays this Latin feel at the beginning of a recording of Night In Tunisia:
  
  
  
  

On the audio, you can hear him pushing accents around:





These are just tendencies; if you go in just expecting him to play “Elvin-style”, you'll find yourself being constantly surprised by him. He's a creative player, operating in the moment; these stylistic things that seem so obvious to us are not what he was thinking about as he was playing. Also, I should mention the obvious: that he was a jazz musician, so all of this stuff is in the context of playing jazz tunes, with jazz soloists. Without that basis, it's kind of meaningless.

Here's the shortest possible list of essential listening I could come up with:
John Coltrane: My Favorite Things, Impressions, Live At Birdland, Coltrane, Sun Ship
McCoy Tyner: The Real McCoy
Elvin Jones: The Ultimate

Papa Jo

h/t to Ed Pierce and Carlton Jackson

Survival chops: triplets in 5/4

Part of the idea of this “survival” series is to be very right hand (or leading hand, if you play lefty) oriented; we want to start every measure with the right hand— it just suits the needs of playing music on the drumset better. An awkward thing about playing alternating triplets in odd meters— including 3/4— is that every downbeat lands on the opposite hand from the last. So to make that right hand orientation happen here, so we can feel a little freer with this type of thing, we'll play a sticking of RRL on beat 5. We also could've used RLL, but RRL is a little hipper.

Many of these will sound rather far out your bandmates' ears, and you could lose them— not every single pattern is practical vocabulary— but having played through them you'll be much less likely to accidentally play something that gets you lost.

An easy modification of this would be to play doubles on all the unaccented notes, except for the two rights in row on beat 5. You could also pencil in whatever drags or flams you want. A reasonable workout with this page would be to play each exercise 2-8 times, going on to the next one without stopping; you could do that at two different tempos

Get the pdf

DBMITW: Headhunters

Here's something special for the new year: Herbie Hancock's Headhunters— the Thrust lineup, with Mike Clark— playing live in Europe in 1974:



There's another one which has embedding disabled, so you'll have to click through to listen to it.