Maybe this is old news, but I had no idea this existed.
I've owned Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer for years, but never spent much time with it, and it definitely didn't come with a CD. Lately I've been digging in to it, and enjoying it a lot. Curious about a few questions I had about the material I jumped online and ended up stumbling upon this....
Though the book was first published in 1948, it looks like the record wasn't released until 1970. But in it, Chapin goes through the entire book, playing every exercise alone, and some with a bass player. It answers pretty much every question I've seen on various forums about the interpretation of the book. So, it, like me, you are working through this book and find yourself wondering what Chapin intended then be sure to check out the playlist above. It's all there.
Keeping on with the current comping theme I figured I'd transcribe some of Max's comping to go with the Sandu solo I did a couple months ago. It was quite hard to hear some of it, but it's largely accurate. As best I can tell, Max is feathering through the whole tune. So, for the sake of clarity I left the feathering out, and only notated the bass drum notes that are part of the comping figures.
Here's another sheet of comping exercises using melodies, this time with Charlie Parker's "Yardbird Suite". Again, I've pulled out a handful of the phrases that are the most "drummy" and turned them into exercises. Check out the previous post for a full explanation.
There is plenty of great resource material out there for learn how to comp in straight ahead jazz styles, with more coming out all the time. But turning that material from an exercise on a page into real music can sometimes be a difficult leap. One of my favorite ways of dealing with it is to transcribe the comping of great jazz musicians. The obvious choice would be drummers like Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones (here's another), and Charlie Smith. But you can also transcribe the comping of other rhythm section players, like this example of Bill Charlap.
But another way is to use actual melodies to your advantage. Bebop and instrumental tunes work best for this, as vocal tunes and Great American Songbook repertoire tends to be too open to interpretation for this particular application. Transcribe (or use a lead sheet) the heads of popular jazz standards. Just the rhythm of the melody is fine - there's no need to worry about the pitches at this point - then play those figures on the drums.
Start by reading the resulting rhythms on the snare. Then add the bass drum. If you want to take it farther you could add the hi-hat, tom orchestrations, etc. But if you listen to the examples linked above, the majority of straight ahead comping relies primarily on the snare and bass. I like to isolate excerpts that I feel are most applicable and come up with various different orchestrations.
Here's an example using Charles Mingus' tune, "Moanin'". At the top of the sheet is the full melody rhythm. Below that I've taken individual phrases and written out four potential orchestrations for each. These are, of course, just a few potential options, and you should come up with some of your own. Mine lean a bit heavier on the snare than the bass drum, and don't use too many bass drum doubles, but again, you can do anything you like with it.
I was recently turned on to this recording featuring a young Art Blakey playing with Charlie Parker. This is an era of Blakey I've not been too familiar with until now. I know he played in fellow Pittsburgher, Billy Eckstine's band and with Fletcher Henderson in the big band era, and did some work with Dizzy Gillespie. Bit still, when I think of Blakey I (like most people, probably) tend think of the Jazz Messengers, of driving shuffles, and of hard bop leaders like Hank Mobley, Jimmy Smith, and Lee Morgan. So I find it really interesting to hear him playing in this much earlier bebop style.
The left hand comping, which I've transcribed here is out of sight, but what also struck me was the bass drum. That's far more than "feathering". He's thumping that thing pretty hard on all four beats, which I think still carried over a bit from the big band era before it started getting lighter. I only notated the bass drum when he plays it even harder than the "feathering", or when it feels like part of the larger phrase. The recording quality is pretty rough, but as far as I can tell he doesn't alter his ride cymbal pattern much.
I also noticed how many three-beat groupings he plays, both in quarter notes....
....and in eight notes....
So, here's all the comping, minus the heads. Each page is a chorus and is time stamped at the top. Drop me an e-mail if you'd like the PDF.
This sheet can be used at any tempo, really, but what I had in mind when I came up with it was the "Uptempo Studies" from John Riley's Beyond Bop Drumming. Whereas the examples in BBD are all on the beat and designed to clean up unisons, I thought it would be nice to augment that with syncopated rhythms often heard by drummers like Philly Joe, and Jimmy Cobb.
What makes this awkward for some is not necessarily the tempo. It's the fact that the coordination changes when we reach a certain tempo. The same way a roll has a "check pattern" or "skeleton", so does our ride cymbal pattern. When we play a double stroke roll, for example, we hear 32nd notes, but our arms move at the rate of 16th notes. So, on the ride cymbal at slow and medium tempos our arm is playing on all four beats while our hand and/or fingers control the skip note. Using the first example on the sheet, that makes the coordination like this:
But when we get to faster tempos we tend to throw the stick on beats 2 and 4, and get the skip note on beats 1 and 3 with rebound and fingers. That changes the coordination to this:
Not necessarily harder, just different.
So, if you're finding this exercise difficult, try reading it as written while just playing the ride cymbal on beats 2 and 4 along with the hi-hat. Then add the other notes as you feel comfortable. Drop me an e-mail if you'd like a PDF.
This is one I've been meaning to do for a long time. Years, really. I remember the first time I saw this video in college, and was struck by a few things. For one, I don't know that I had seen a left-handed jazz drummer before then. Also, the band seemed like an unlikely bunch. For one, I was surprised not to see Max Roach on drums, and two the bassist, who is named Sandy Block, seemed kind of old for that crew. And the pianist is Dick Hyman, who was also a host of the television show that this performance was on.
The drummer is Charlie Smith. His name isn't thrown around as often as the likes of Kenny Clarke or Max Roack, but he had an enviable career working for the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, Oscar Peterson, and more.
I love Charlie's feel on this tune, and the minimal set up with the jumbo bass drum.
We're often told to listen to other instruments as we can learn a lot from them. But not many people ever say what it is we can learn from those instruments. Well, one thing that we drummers can take from harmonic instruments like piano or guitar is comping ideas. After all, they're acCOMPanying the soloist just as we are, so why should their rhythmic ideas be seen as any less valid than that of a drummer? Simply put, they shouldn't, because they aren't. Here I've transcribed Bill Charlap comping behind trumpeter Brian Lynch on the album Brian Lynch Meets Bill Charlap. Joe Farnsworth is on drums, so there's plenty of other great material on the record for us to check out at some point, but for now we'll stick with Bill. I've simply written out the rhythmic ideas of his comping, and what we're left with is a sheet that looks very much like a page out of The Art of Bop Drumming, but in a less exercise-y, more musical form.
We can use this sheet in many of the same ways as AoB, or Syncopation. Here are a few. Play a stock ride cymbal pattern, and hi-hats on 2 and 4 unless otherwise noted.
Play it with your left hand. If you're new to this type of playing or independence maybe start with just two or four bars at a time. Imagine, or write in, repeats.
Play the whole thing with your left hand, right foot, and left foot individually
Alternate notes between two or three different voices
Play downbeats on the bass drum, and upbeats on the snare drum
Any time you see two or more consecutive 8th notes play them all on the snare until you reach the last note which you then play on the bass drum
Play any 8th notes on the snare, and anything longer on the bass drum, or bass drum doubled in the right hand, regardless of where you are in the ride pattern
Improvise. Play all the notes where they are rhythmically, but interpret the chart however you see fit.
These are, of course, just a few of the countless ways to approach this sheet, or any others like it. Todd Bishop, over at Cruise Ship Drummer! has about a million and one different approaches to using this type of material, Robert Breithaupt has a nice list, and there are countless other sites and books offering different approaches
Continuing on with our look at telecoteco and other Brasilian comping rhythms here is a tamborim transcription from "A Vizinha do Lado" on Roberta Sá's record Braseiro. Just as with jazz or any other style of music, one of the best ways to learn how to execute these rhythms in a stylistically appropriate fashion is to go straight to the source and listen and transcribe. In this case we hear percussionist Marcelo Costa on tamborim starting about halfway through the tune. This one will require some serious listening as there is a lot of shape and articulation that is not notated. I intentionally did not write any articulation A) so as to make it clearer to read, and B) so anyone following along and/or trying to play this wouldn't get bogged down by notation, but rather, would simply listen. That said, there are a couple of things worth drawing your attention to. What I've notated in the transcription are just the notes played by the stick on the head of the tamborim. Quite often, with the hand holding the drum, the underside of the head is tapped with the a finger in between the notes played with the stick. So, a stock telecoteco pattern would look like this:
Almost 100% of the time when you find two 16th notes side by side, the first is a pick-up note played far more quietly than the second note, which is then accented. Note that Marcelo is improvising here, but he is always on the correct side of the rhythm. If you play any stock telecoteco pattern (see the "up" side of the sheet linked here) through the whole tune you will notice that it never crosses the melody or anything that Marcelo is playing. This is extremely important when improvising in this style, and we'll chat more about how to do this next time. Finally, remember that these rhythms are completely transferrable. You don't have to be a tamborim player and/or percussionist for this transcription to be useful to you. Try orchestrating it a number of different ways while playing along to the recording. Here are a few ideas to get you started: *Read the transcription on rim click with any of the right hand and feet ideas from the samba starter *Play 16ths notes with brushes and accent the notes of the transcription, again with feet patterns from the samba starter *Play the transcription on the ride cymbal, and fill in the gaps with ghost notes on the snare. Feet, samba starter. You get the idea.
Looking at telecoteco again, let’s talk about entradas.
An entrada is exactly what the word translates to, an entrance. This entrance takes a slightly different form depending on the style of samba. In a batucada or enredo setting, this is more of a bold statement, announcing that the tamborims have arrived to the party. It reminds me of the way a conga player plays his big fills after the downbeat of the next section, rather than leading into it. Some batucada-style entradas are longer than two bars, and generally lead to the carreteiro style of tamborim, which is the constant swinging 16th notes achieved by turning the drum with the left hand. Some of these entradas are traditional and commonly heard across various groups, whereas other are composed for a specific escola de samba or their enredo (show) for the year. A few examples:
In a pagode setting, however (or on a drum kit in our case) an entrada is simply a way to set us off on the right foot, especially when our telecoteco is likely to begin on a syncopated note. We discussed last time about how telecoteco has an “up” side and a “down” side. To start on the down side you could probably get away without playing an entrada at all as the pattern starts clean on beat one. However, to start on the up side we use the entrada to set our ears and sense of time before we get into the heavily syncopated pattern that just seems to effortlessly roll over barline after barline. This could be as simple as adding one downbeat to the start of the syncopated side….
But, more often, an entrada is two bars long. A few examples….
Generally, these entradas start on the downbeat of a new phrase, but I have occasionally heard them played in the two bars leading to the new phrases, almost like a fill, such that once the downbeat of the new section is reached the listener is already hearing telecoteco. Here’s an example of this that we’ll talk more about next time.
Finally, I know I said that entradas start on a downbeat to set our ears, but there is one instance in which it starts on a syncopated note. One syncopated note on the “e” of one, followed by some steady 8th notes until the start of the phrases is reached. That lone 16th note is generally given a pretty sturdy accent, sort of like a kick in the pants to get the section going.
Below are some various entradas followed by telecoteco and partido alto patterns. Bear in mind that the entradas are not married to the specific patterns that follow them. Pretty much any of these entradas will work with any variant of telecoteco or partido alto, so long as you are on the correct side of the beat. Experiment with some of the entradas here along with some of the telecoteco variations from last time.
If you’ve listened to, or played, much Brazilian music, you’ve certainly come across these rhythms regardless of whether or not you knew their names. I’ve written about partido alto and Bossa Nova in earlier posts, so today let’s look mainly at telecoteco, which serves the same role, and is essentially a substitute for, or variation of, partido alto.
The telecoteco rhythm shares a similarity with Cuban clave in that it has two “sides”. The rhythm is two bars of 2/4 long, and can be played starting on either bar. There is an “up side”, starting on the second 16th note, and a “down side”, which starts on the downbeat. As in Cuban clave, the melodic line of the song is directly connected to the direction of the telecoteco rhythm, and should not cross it as this creates some pretty unpleasant rhythmic tension. One place in which telecoteco differs from clave though is that improvisation within the constructs of telecoteco is perfectly acceptable, whereas in clave it absolutely is not, but more on that in the next post. For now, here are the most common variations of the rhythm:
E-mail me for a PDF of this sheet
There are a few different approaches to telecoteco. In the more traditional styles of samba, such as batucada or pagode, the direction of the telecoteco does not change during the song under any circumstances. Getting on the wrong side of the rhythm (playing cruzado) will draw the ire of other players around and you can expect a fair amount of eye-rolling and ridicule. On the other hand in the more jazz influenced styles of samba in the 1960s and 70s where you’re more likely to see drum set and piano it seemed to be more acceptable to freely switch between the up and down side, the telecoteco being more of a vibe than a rule. I also feel like the more traditional styles of samba tend to play more on the “up” side of the telecoteco, whereas jazz-oriented (and gringo) interpretations tend to start on the “down” side.
In an enredo, or batucada ensemble you’re most likely to hear telecoteco being played on a tamborim. In terms of moving this to the set, the obvious approach is to play these rhythms on a rim click, or maybe snare drum or tom. Head back to the Jazz Samba Builder and try some combinations of right hand and foot ostinatos while adding these telecoteco variations in your left hand.
But, don’t forget the concept we talked about back in May based on Kiko Freitas' style of playing, wherein we move the ostinato part to the left hand, and improvise or “comp” with the right hand. Check out that post here, and try some of the same foot patterns with telecoteco in your right hand.
Full disclosure: this is a re-blog of a re-blog, so I'm taking no credit here. I was over at Cruise Ship Drummer! as I often am, where Todd was developing some ideas based on a post by Chris Smith about Mel Lewis' "Rub-a-Dub" lick.
As a pretty big fan of Mel's playing I'm ashamed to say that I had never heard the name "Rub-a-Dub". I immediately recognized the sound and concept when I heard it, but I didn't realize that Mel had given it a little onomatopoeic name. It's a pretty simple concept, and a clever way of seamlessly making ensemble hits be it in a big band setting or over a solo vamp. When done right, it sits in this beautiful space where it's busier than general time keeping, but isn't full-on Buddy Rich. It's the best of both worlds, and depending on how you play it you can lean more heavily to one side that the other.
The other beauty of it is that although it is born from a pretty specific style, the idea is extremely applicable to other ways of playing. Straighten out the 8th notes, and you're well on your way to a very cool ECM sort of sound for starters. Anyway....
The basic sticking looks like so:
LRR = Rub a Dub
Voiced on the kit, keep the left hand on the snare and the right on the ride cymbal (at least to start). This is what allows it to feel simultaneously like time playing and soloing.
The first of each right hand is also played on the bass drum. This is where most of the hits should fall.
From there, you can start moving the left hand, or the second right around the kit.
Chris gives a far better explanation of it than I have, and he plays some great examples, so be sure to check out his video, as well as Todd's posts taking it a few steps further. Chris wrote out the ideas on his blog, but I knocked them into Sibelius so I could print it out for some of my students who will really benefit from it. I am, of course, happy to send anyone a copy if interested. Just drop me an e-mail.
Definitely check out the rest of Chris' "The Drum Hang". It's a brand new blog - only seven posts so far - but he's putting out content pretty consistently and it's all great stuff.
If you're a "jazz" drummer, chances are you already have a sheet that looks something like this, or have worked on these patterns without a sheet. As I've been into a lot of Bill Stewart lately, who plays many triplety ideas such as these, I figured I'd whip up an exhaustive work sheet. If you're new to jazz drumming and four-way independence, this sheet is a must do as these phrases can be the building blocks to bigger things. Play time on your ride cymbal (don't alter the sticking just yet) and, where applicable, play the hi-hat on 2 and 4. You can also play around around with feathering the bass drum in the examples that don't have a written bass part. Use a metronome sounding only on 2 and 4, or better yet, play along to a recording of your favorite drummer. Even if you're an experienced player, work your way through this sheet and see what happens. If you're human like the rest of us, there will almost certainly be a few of these that feel a little more awkward that the others. The examples are intentionally not numbered. If you read downward the rhythm stays the same while the voicing changes. Read across, and the voicing remains while the rhythm shifts. Or, of course, you can always just choose at random, or choose the ones that work best (or worst) for you. E-mail me for a PDF.
This is an exercise I typically give to my students who are fairly early on in their jazz drumming journey. But lately I've also been giving it to more experienced students as a bit of a brush up. What I've found is that every single one of them finds at least a few of the bars difficult. The reason for this, I'm guessing, is that fact that most of us work out of books like Syncopation and The Art of Bop Drumming, which presents pre-composed musical ideas based on common jazz vocabulary. However, many students don't take the time to learn to place notes in every crack and crevice.
I once got into a bit of a debate with a reader of this blog, who, after seeing another exercise I had posted told me that "Life is too short to waste time on such 'exercises'". That made me stop and think for a minute. Could he be right? After all, we're trying to make music. Everyone seems to be obsessed with technical aptitude nowadays; sometimes to the point of detriment to the music. Why bother with hours of patterns and exercises? We should be expressing ourselves! But my doubt was very short lived once I remembered my own advice that I give to all of my students, which is to remember that music truly is a language and all of these exercises that we work on are part of our vocabulary. The larger our vocabulary, the more effectively we can articulate what it is that we would like to convey. It’s no different than speech, really. As toddlers we could point and bang things and shout to get what we wanted, but as we get older and develop a fuller vocabulary we can be more specific and convey our feelings with eloquence and style. By working exercises like this we further our ability to take the ideas that we think and feel and release them through our limbs.
OK, on to the notes. You can apply this to any number of styles, but as I said, I generally use this with students who are learning to play jazz. Swing time in the right hand, read the exercise with the left hand, right foot and left foot.
I’ve notated it so that makes sense to read it both across and down. By reading across you shift horizontally, one note at a time. By reading down you start in the same place every time but add two notes, then three.
Here is a versatile coordination concept that I often use when working on new groove ideas. For lack of a better name I simply call it 3, 5, 7, because what we are essentially doing is implying 3, 5 and 7 (8 or 16) over 4/4. By implying odd time signatures we can play over the bar line and build longer phrases with a more fluid sense of improvisatory time playing while also strengthening our coordination over a new ostinato or grooves. In general I try not to think of this exercise in terms of one time signature being implied over another. I’m not trying to see how many mathematical permutations I can achieve. I’m simply trying to further develop coordination and facility in improvising. Remember, music, not math.
There are a number of different ways you can use this concept. As I’ve been doing a lot of samba stuff lately let's start with that as an example. Say you’re working on some of the patterns from the Jazz Samba Builder. You’re comfortable with many, or all of the combinations, and now you want to start playing longer phrases and improvising.
Try, say, the second ride cymbal pattern, with the first bass drum pattern, and upbeats on the hi-hats, which would look like so:
With the left hand, then, try each of the 3, 5, and 7 exercises (the note values will be cut in half). You can orchestrate them as a rim click, or lightly on the snare. As with the Four Limb Warm-Up exercise, these will naturally resolve after an odd number of bars, but you should work in more common phrases, like 4, 8 and 12 bars. The best way to do this, of course, would be to play along with music rather than using a metronome. Each of them would look like this:
Once you’re comfortable with each of them, you can thicken things up a little bit by adding a “skip” note. Any time you have note followed by two 8th note rests, play two notes instead of just one, which will look like so:
Applied to the previous exercise:
We can also achieve some great textures by applying this to the ride cymbal. Use the same feet patterns as before and play the 3, 5, and 7 patterns on the ride cymbal. With your left hand you can fill in the gaps:
Or for a sound with a little more depth I like to play the snare drum on all of the 16th note upbeats (this fits the samba feel particularly well), like so:
If you’re feeling a little more ambitious, you can try to play some of the left hand patterns from the Jazz Samba Builder sheet while you play the 3, 5, 7 ideas on the ride.
You can also apply this concept to your feet, and any number of different types of grooves. Use it to develop coordination, longer phrases, soloing ideas, etc. Once you’re comfortable with whatever way you try to orchestrate these ideas, start improvising with them by stringing them together and mixing and matching. Although I have notated some examples for you here, I recommend that whatever you apply this concept to you do so without reading. Learn to feel these ideas rather than trying to think of one time signature over another.
