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Houghton’s triplets

From Steve Houghton’s book Studio and Big Band Drumming, here’s an alternate sticking method for making triplets out of Syncopation. For most people the most familiar method is…

Basic paradiddle funk

Man, there’s just a whole lot of stuff besides blogging on my mind lately— like a Europe tour and recording project— so we may not see a lot…

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–…

Rudimental Reed: five stroke rolls

I’ve been fooling around with applying some rudiments to the long exercises in Syncopation, by Ted Reed. We’ll start humbly with it, converting the written quarter notes (and…

Expanding on The Kenny Note

What we have here are some very basic comping ideas based on the so-called (by me only, I’m sure) “Kenny” note— a snare drum punctuation on the &…

Hemiola basics

The hemiola— also called the 3:2 polyrhythm– is a basic polyrhythm using layered even two and three note rhythms. What I’ve done here is outline some ways of…

How much to practice something

1. Get wood chisel. 2. Remove everything that doesn’t look like Billy the Kid deftly gunning down Bat Masterson before the throng of stunned onlookers, a yapping yellow…

Several big band drumming books

A couple of new/old big band drumming books dropped into my lap recently, so what the heck, I thought I’d round them up for you: Studio & Big…

Six stroke rolls around the drums

I’m just cranking them out today. I’ve been using the last paradiddles around the drums thing so much I decided to write up something similar using another familiar…

Kernels of Cascara

My students have been doing so well with my “kernels” concept that I’ve decided to write up a real challenge for them: cascara with the clave in the…