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.

Articulation Control with Paradiddles

At the moment I have a couple of students working on Wilcoxon’s “Paradiddle Johnnie” from “Modern Rudimental Swing Solos”.  Both of them are playing really well, but are finding it difficult to control their stick heights/volume so that there is only two distinct levels of sound - accent and unaccented.

In passages such as this one, in “Paradiddle Johnnie”…

…the students are unintentionally producing a third sound by giving additional weight, or emphasis to unaccented notes that fall on a downbeat.  What comes out is a sound that is softer than an accent, but louder that a tap stroke.

So, to help remedy this, I whipped up a simple paradiddle exercise that isolates those phrases, and other ones similar to it.

7-stroke roll permutations

I recently had a friend working on rolls, and in asking me some questions about them I realized that he was only playing them exactly as they are written in the 40 PAS rudiments.  To my mind, the numbered rolls are simply an indicator of how many strokes are to be played within a certain amount of space, and should not be limited to the way they are notated on the chart hanging in every percussion studio in the world.  So I whipped up this handy dandy sheet of a few simple permutations of the 7-stroke roll.

Also included are the various styles of notation, which we’ve already covered before.  For less experienced players, I find this more modern style of notation to be a little be clearer in showing how many strokes are intended and where the composer would like those notes to be placed.

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.

7-stroke roll notation in Wilcoxon

Recently, on the Drummerworld Forum, someone asked a question about the notation of 7-stroke rolls in the Wilcoxon books.  I field this question quite often from my students as well.

Many of the youngsters today are not familiar with the notation style of Wilcoxon.  Most of the rolls, like the 5-stroke and 9-stroke are pretty much self-explanatory.  However, when the 7-stroke comes in it’s a bit different.  The thing to remember is that there is not one set way or rhythm in which to play a 7-stroke roll.  The name simply describes how many strokes are in that roll.

Take Solo No. 26, for example, from The All-American Drummer.  In the first two measures we see a 7-stroke roll on the “&” of beat 2.  In this instance, the skeleton of the roll would actually be played as a 16th note triplet.  In line 3 we again see a 7-stroke roll notated on the “&s” of 1 and 2, but here they have a ruff in front of them.  When you see this, the ruff, which falls on the 16th note before the 8th note, is treated as part of the 7-stroke roll.  Is it 2 of the 7 strokes.  This changes the rhythmic makeup of the roll.  It now becomes what is called a “tap seven”, which is a single stroke on the downbeat, followed by double strokes on “e, &, a”.  Here is each type of 7-stroke roll with its modern notation equivalent.

Stylistically, the triplet-based 7-stroke that starts on the “&” is played behind the beat, almost out of time.  There is a small breath before it is played, and the rhythm itself it stretched.  There are quite a few examples of this interpretation here: