Friday, August 17, 2012

Calypso Beat

Hey,
I heard this on the radio the other day so I tried to figure it out. A couple of things are a little tricky,
You have to get the RH over to the snare to play the open sound on the + of 1 in every 4th bar (there isn't time to move the LH to the open snare from the rim click, especially because I think I took this a little under the original tempo) and I thought the drummer kept the hi-hat going so I played it with my foot while my RH is moving over.




It's a sort of fun relentless groove. Sort of also reminds me of Merengue too. All musics are related!

Later!

Thursday, August 16, 2012

2 brush variations for Right Hand

Here's a couple of more brush variations, mainly what the right hand does makes them slightly different.




In the first one the R.H. slides away from you on 1 and 3, and taps 2,4, and the skip beat. I call it Back Beat because I like accenting 2 and 4 a bit.





In the second one we're tapping the skip beat and moving towards us on beats 1 and 3. Coming off the drum with an accent on 2 and 4. Sort of "flicking" the brush away, hence the title.




Hope you enjoy these. Thanks!






Tuesday, August 14, 2012

4 limb single stroke melodies

Hey all,
I'm going to demonstrate something I stole from Mike Essoudry at Carleton Jazz Camp this week. Mike explained the idea of playing any rhythm and alternating between all 4 limbs in a predetermined order. He was talking about using it for reading studies but I thought I would apply it to standard melodies.

There's a few things about this that are cool:

1. It helps strengthen your knowledge of whatever melody you're playing.

If you don't know the tune really well, the whole thing will fall apart very quickly.

2. It gets you used to playing the rhythm of a melody, without necessarily playing its pitch contour.

You're almost assigning the rhythm of the melody to different pitches. (Which, by the way, is a concept Hal Galper talks about as a way of having hip rhythms in a solo.)

3. It gets you used to memorizing (by both sound and feel) repeating pitch patterns.

This will help you be ready to repeat ideas, even while improvising.

Here's the first example. One chorus of the melody to "Straight, No Chaser". The limb pattern is LF, RH, LH, RF. You could also sing the sound of the pitch pattern as ti,ss,pa, doom or something like that to help you memorize the sound.




Here's another example. This is "Billie's Bounce" with a RH, LH, RF, LF limb pattern. The cool thing about this melody is each chorus it starts on the next limb of the cycle, so I played it 4 times to start from each place.




Obviously there many other orders of limbs you can try. You can also split up melodies between 3 limbs and use the remaining limb in a more static, timekeeping way.

That's what music is, you continually walk towards the horizon, and it just keeps moving back on you! Good luck.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Peter Donald!

Hey all,
Been busy teaching at a camp (and am about to head to another). I hope to post some new brush patterns soon but in the meantime. let's all dig Peter Donald playing with John Abercrombie's great quartet with Richie Beirach and George Mraz.

What is Jazz? This is a pretty good definition, I think!