Tony Williams-Style Flam Drags

Calling these "Tony Williams-Style Flam Drags" is potentially a bit unfair.  After all, Tony isn't the first or only person to play flam drags on the kit.  Actually, the ideas below seems to be quite in vogue at the moment. But Tony probably is one of the earlier players to split them around the kit in this fashion.  I have some students digging deep into Tony at the moment, and I've also been working on some transcriptions for a scholarly article being written at the University of Oregon, and have seen these flam drags pop up quite a few times.

Your basic flam drag, if you aren't already familiar, is a three-note phrase.  A flam, followed by a double stroke, and then a tap with alternating sticking, which we can group as triplets, or 8th/16th notes.

Another common way to play flam drags is to keep the rhythm the same, but change the sticking to that of a Swiss Army Triple.  RRL or LLR.  Even though the rhythm is exactly the same, the sticking gives it a different character.  This one, in particular, sits very nicely on the kit and is a lot of fun to play.

And if we change the sticking one more time, as well as the accent pattern, we get another interesting phrase that I've heard Tony do quite a bit.  This one is also quite common in the drum corp scene, and I believe they gave it one of those goofy names, but I don't recall what it is off the top of my head.

As always, these are just the stock versions of this rudiment and it's sticking variations.  Get creative and spend some time voicing it around the kit and in different parts of the bar.

Jeff "Tain" Watts Songo Grooves and Fills

For some reason this one has been in the drafts folder for ages, so I'm excited to finally get it out.  I came across this video a few years ago of Tain playing with an unnamed band at the San Jose Jazz Fest in 2014.  I was initially taken by the way he used the cowbell, and by the way he put the last note of the tumbao on the tom or floor tom instead of the bass drum, so I decided to dig into it.

 

It's funny when we first see/hear certain things, especially at brighter tempos, it seems like there is so much going on, but when you look a little deeper at this video you'll notice that Tain isn't actually playing that many different things rhythmically.  It's often the same, or very similar, stickings orchestrated differently around the drums (sort of like in the Eric Harland transcription we looked at way back when).

And, speaking of what he's playing, it's basically a 3-2 Songo.  This may not immediately jump out at you as a Songo, because Songo is so often played in 2-3.  So much so that 2-3 Songo is often simply taught as the single way to play Songo.  A quick Google search turns up a plethora of images that look like this:

Now, I'm not suggesting that there is anything wrong with this.  This is a perfectly acceptable way to play a Songo.  It's just that I get the feeling that a lot of drummers don't appreciate the fact that Songo isn't a pattern or sticking, but a style, to which there is much more than this one way of playing that is often shown to be the "correct" way.

Check out where the clave fits in the pattern above:

This can just as easily be played in 3-2:

And of course this is, by far, not the only sticking and/or orchestration that we can employ, as we can see in the Tain video.

There are plenty of hits in this tunes, so rather than transcribe the whole video and end up with a lot of superfluous material, I decided to grab the sections of groove that could easily be applied elsewhere, as well as some fills to go along with them.  You'll have to use your ears and some common sense, but you could likely take a lot of these grooves and mix and match them with the fills at various points to come up with some nice ideas of your own.

Applying the Rudiments - 5-Stroke Roll

I find one of the biggest disconnects with younger/less experienced players is between rudiments and actual music.  So often they're told, "You need to learn your rudiments!", but not why they should learn the rudiments, or how to actively apply them to music making.

So, let's start with a pretty basic applications in a straight ahead sort of style, first by playing the 5-stroke roll as it's often notated in books:

Next, trade fours with yourself, preferably with a metronome, or better yet, a record.  Four bars of time, and four bars of 5-stroke roll as written above.  For now keep your feet going while you "solo", like so:

There are infinite possibilities here when it comes to orchestration, but if this concept is new to you or your student let's just start by keeping all the double strokes on the snare and moving the single strokes to the toms; right hand to the floor tom, left hand to the mounted tom:

One of the things with rudiments that I don't think is immediately obvious to students is the idea of permutation.  Keep in mind that a 5-stroke roll is just that - five strokes; two double strokes and a single stroke.  There's nothing to say that it has to be played exactly as written above.  We can start it anywhere in the bar to create new rhythmic ideas.  With that in mind, try starting with the single stroke, and also starting on the upbeats.  For the sake of clarity I've left out the bass drum and hi-hat notation, but I'd still recommend keeping them in for now.

Let's play the single strokes as an eighth note rather than a quarter note for a longer phrase.  This will create a hemiola that will naturally resolve after three bars.  Try playing these in both four and eight bar phrases.  For four bar phrases you'll play measures 1, 2 and 3, and then measure 1 again.

And lastly (for now) turn the whole thing into triplets:

The examples here are just the tip of the iceberg as the possibilities really are endless.  Of course I recommend you put in your Wilcoxon time, and if you really want to go deeper into this stuff check out Joe Morello's book Rudimental Jazz.

Here's the whole sheet laid out.  Please feel free to get in touch if you'd like a PDF copy.

Mel Lewis' "Rub-a-Dub"

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.

Quick Lick - Jeff Hamilton

In an effort to start posting more regularly again I thought I'd do a couple of short posts to get myself back in the habit of signing in to Blogger.

Awhile back I was considering buying a riveted china cymbal for that big band sort of vibe.  I eventually decided against it (at least for now), but I did come across some videos of Jeff Hamilton demoing one of them.  At the end of one of the videos Jeff plays a very nice little one-bar fill.  It's nothing difficult, but it sits under the hands really nicely and is fun to play.  So I thought I'd jot it down for you in case anyone was interested in a new fill to throw into their bag.

Start around 0:32 for the fill

Permutations of a Bill Stewart fill

If you're a Bill Stewart fan then you almost certainly recognize this lick...

It pops up quite a lot in Bill's playing.  The placement of the bass drum seems to change from time to time.  Maybe it's a tempo thing or maybe just a personal choice.  Either way it's worth trying all three versions.

I was playing around with this phrase recently and started moving it around the bar, and inverting it, ending up with ideas like this....

Just by shifting everything by an 8th note we can get three very different feeling phrases.  Place the bass drum in all three places for each permutation and all of a sudden we've got 9 different phrases to play around with.

By playing 16th notes instead of triplets we can take this one step farther....

We now have a three beat phrase, which works well in 3/4, or perhaps even more so, as a hemiola idea that moves over the bar line.

Send me an e-mail if you'd like a PDF page of all the combinations.

Max Roach fill in triplets

Here's a little variation I came up with of a classic Max Roach fill.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with this one:

It pops up in many great Roach solos, including "Jacqui".  Check out measures 18-19, at 0:28 on the video).

Another great way of playing this, especially when the tempo won't allow you to tear through those 16th notes is to simply play it with triplets.  There are a few different ways we can approach this.

First, let's keep the movement from drum to drum as close to the original spot as possible, like so:

Now, let's keep the original sticking intact.  We'll have to squish the ending a bit:

There are, of course, many different ways to arrange this fill, and I encourage you to come up with your own.  Here's one of mine.  Adding accents gives this fill some extra shape and makes it even more melodic than it already is.  I changed the ending a bit as well for a bigger impact.