Rubinho Barsotti (1932-2020)

Unfortunately, we've lost another one of the greats.

Rubinho Barsotti was one of the master Brazilian drummers in the period when samba was first being played on the drum set.  As a founding member of Zimbo Trio, Rubinho was at the forefront of the samba-jazz sound.  The trio had a long and successful career on their own, but also backed big-name singers like Elis Regina.  Check out O Fino Do Fino.  Outside of Zimbo Trio Barsotti also played with American jazz masters such as Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Kenny Dorham, and more.

For some reason, his name doesn't seem to be thrown around as much as those of Edison Machado, Milton Banana, and Paulo Braga.  Perhaps (and hopefully) this is only true outside of Brazil.  I'm even a bit guilty of over-looking him myself.  Despite checking out a lot of Zimbo Trio records over the years, I've never transcribed any of Rubinho's playing or played along to his records.  As is often the case, these sad moments inspire us to get to work, so hopefully I'll have something for you soon.

In the meantime, check out any of the many great Zimbo Trio records.  Their self-titled 1964 debut is one of my personal faves.

Transcription - Marcelo Costa, tamborim on "A Vizinha do Lado"

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.

How to practice flam rudiments

Just about every high school drumline has an exercise that looks something like this.

But I think it's often unclear to students, and poorly explained by instructors, as to what the purpose of this exercise is.  So I thought it would be good to pull this apart a little bit as, when done properly, it can be a very beneficial exercise, and can apply to any flam rudiment.

The basic gist of the exercise above is that the first two bars are what your hands are playing individually when playing flam accents.  But what has always bugged me is that the right and left hands are notated the same.  A better representation would be to play what the right hand actually plays, then what the left hand actually plays before putting it together.  From there you could play the whole exercise off the left if you wished.  Here's what that would look like.

To separate the hands and see what each one is doing is all well and good, but we can get more out of this.  In a flam passage such as this it can be easy to get lazy with the notes in-between the accents and/or flams.  These notes are often referred to as the "inner-beats". Which leads us to another drumline buzz-phrase: "watch the inner beats".  I heard/hear this time and time again, but again, it is rarely explained.  To "watch the inner beats" is to NOT be lazy with the notes in-between the accents and/or flams.  And better yet, we can break them down and practice them in a focused manner.  Let's try it with Flam Paradiddles this time.

Below are flam paradiddles followed by the rhythm played by each hand.

This time around, rather than just playing those rhythms as written, let's "clean up the inner beats" by breaking down the mechanics of each hand before putting them together.  To do this we'll look at the Strokings™ ala Accents and Rebounds.

On the right hand we begin with a downstroke so that our hand remains low for the next three tap strokes, which are followed by an upstroke in preparation for the next downstroke.

The left hand plays the same thing, but as it is displaced by a beat we begin with a tap stroke, followed by an upstroke again in preparation for the accent, which will be a downstroke so we're ready to play the next three tap strokes.

This may all seem a bit pedantic, but if you find that your flam passages are a bit "mushy", this will certainly clean them up, and by breaking down the mechanics of our motion we can build speed and efficiency.

Remember that this can be applied to any flam rudiment.  Note what each hand plays alone, figure out the strokings, and play them slowly before putting them back together.

Groove Transcription - Roni Size, "New Forms"

Drum 'n' Bass, as far as I can remember, never got really big in the States.  In high school, I remember some kids listening to techno and going to raves.  Some of these kids were my friends, and I also recall being ridiculed when I told them the only electronic music I could really get into was drum 'n' bass. More than 20 years later, I now teach a class in the history of EDM for West Virginia University, so a couple years ago I spent an entire summer reading about and listening to just about every style of EDM there is.  And while I can appreciate a lot of it more now, I'd still have to say that drum 'n' bass is some of the hippest and most listenable of those styles.  It certainly has the coolest drumming.

One of the most recognizable names in drum 'n' bass is Roni Size.  His album New Forms is a seminal work of the d'n'b canon.  In 1997 it won the Mercury Prize here in the UK, beating out Radiohead's OK Computer.  Below is the title track to the album.  In some ways it's very easy.  It's similar to that rock groove that every non-drummer can somehow kind of play.  But on the other hand, it's very fast, very intricate, and requires a lot of control.

I've written out the main groove that repeats throughout the song, but the devil is in the detail.  If you listen closely to the whole thing, you notice that each time around there are a few notes added here and there, giving it just a little bit more lift and energy each time.  In a weird way it reminds me of how some of the best jazz drummers build the density of their playing so gradually you almost don't notice it happening.  Anyway, here it is.  Drop me a line if you'd like a PDF.

The Three Camps in Double-Paradiddles

The other day I played The Three Camps (and some variations thereof) for the first time in ages, and ended up coming up with a few variations of my own that I'll post in the coming days.  I'm not going to do a whole post about The Three Camps as it's been written about so many times.  All you need to know right now is that it's a really old and famous drum solo that you should know (because that's just what you do), and people often create variations of it.

The first variation is with double-paradiddles.  I've always leaned more heavily towards paradiddlediddles than double-paradiddles, so I've been trying to drive the latter into my playing more lately, which is how this variation came about.

The sheet below is a perfect example of why you should know this piece.  It's a mess to look at.  I've written it all out in case you don't know it, but if you do have it memorized all you need to do is play any beat with an accent on the beat or no accent at all as a double paradiddle, like so....

....and play any beat with an accent on the upbeat with this sticking:

It would probably be a little more true to the original if those upbeat accents were on the fifth 16th note instead of the sixth, but I just felt this had more of that Philly Joe soloing kind of vibe to it.

Try the whole thing off the left hand, too.  More variations to come soon.  Have fun.

Triplet Double-Paradiddle Study w/ Accents and Diddles

Here's a little snare study that developed out of an improv session on the pad in the back yard yesterday.  I was playing double paradiddles in triplets and moving the accents around while trying to vocalize the pulse, which in itself can be difficult and we will chat about in a future post.  After adding some diddles my OCD took over making me want to organize it into some sort of system and symmetry.  Once I conceptualized it and wrote it down I found that parts of it were deceptively difficult for two main reasons:

1. the change in double stroke speed between the 16th notes and the 8th notes of the double paradiddle can be tricky depending on where the 16th notes fall.

2.  the "strokings" (not stickings; see this post) are not always natural in the various permutations found in the study.

Maybe it goes without saying, but I'd recommend slowing this way down and really working out the proper strokings, ala Accents and Rebounds.

Ratamacues Around the Drums

Time to put those rudiments back to work.  Many of the jazz greats used/use the ratamacue as a fill around the kit, so let's do a bit of it ourselves.

Philly Joe Jones comes to mind in particular when I think of this:

And I've heard Jeff Hamilton turn this around and come up the drums, playing the grace notes on the bass drum, like so:

Philly Joe and Jeff Hamilton generally play both of these in a closed interpretation, meaning they are playing a true ruff which comes just before the primary note, not in any specific time.  But as we've discussed before on the blog, these rudiments can also be played with an open interpretation wherein the grace notes become measured, and are played on the note prior to the primary note.  So this....

....becomes this:

Putting this open interpretation on the kit gives us something similar, but with a different vibe to it.

If we take this one step further we may be pushing the boundaries of what a ratamacue truly is, as it's now closer to being a double paradiddle, but we can get a whole series of new ideas nonetheless by playing the grace notes (which sort of cease to be grace notes) on the two 8th notes prior to the primary note as opposed to the two 16th notes before it.  I recently saw Edu Ribeiro playing an idea like this, and brighter tempos it sounds very cool.

And finally, with everything now being evenly spaced it frees us up to move the idea more freely throughout the bar.

Here is everything above neatly organized into one sheet.  Drop me an e-mail if you'd like a PDF.

Edu Ribeiro Baião Language

For those of you wanting to dig a little bit deeper into Forró rhythms, here is a sheet I've put together of some Baião language.  I transcribed these particular phrases from some Edu Ribeiro recordings, so they were all played on the drum set, but they very closely, if not identically, emulate rhythms that you will hear played on zabumba in a traditional Forró ensemble.

If you aren't familiar with some of the basics of Baião you may want to check out the post I wrote about it awhile back, but a stock interpretation would look something like this:

The sheet below contains variations, and fills.  None of these are really intended to be looped over and over like a groove.  Rather, they should be peppered in with a basic Baião as the music dictates.  This sheet makes a great supplement to the Baião Builder.  To create a nice little exercise out of this work out a pattern using the Baião Builder that feels good to you.  Then, create a four-bar phrase by playing the pattern for three bars, and adding in each of the new ideas below in the fourth bar.  Then work out another Baião pattern and do the whole thing again.  Or, add the new phrases to measure three to create an AABA sort of feel.  Do bear in mind though that these new ideas are not only limited to fills, or phrase endings.  You should play them anywhere in the music that you feel is appropriate.

Only the bass and rim/snare parts are shown here as they will work with any of the cymbal variations on the Baião Builder.