I've been re-visiting a lot of Elvin lately as I have a student who is just beginning his deep dive into the material.
In gathering some material to send over to him I was reminded of this excellent post by Canadian drummer, Jon McCaslin on his long-running "Four on the Floor" blog. The whole thing is definitely worth a read, but today I want to focus on one exercise in particular that Jon saw Elvin demonstrate at a clinic in the late '90s.
The concept is fairly simple. You'll play a stock ride cymbal pattern in your right hand, and fill in the remaining triplets on another voice.
Each time through the two-beat ride cymbal pattern we have three notes to play and three limbs to play them with, so start by playing each limb once. That gives us six different combinations to work with.
This wasn't mentioned in the original post, but by playing a double stroke on the snare drum we end up with further Elvin-esque ideas.
Drop me an e-mail if you'd like of PDF of this worksheet, and be sure to check out "Four on the Floor". There is a ton of great stuff over there.
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