Three Camps round up

I recently picked up a stack of Mitchell Peters books, one of which contains several variations on this classic, and it seemed like a good time to round up the various sources and variations on it. In case anyone doesn't know, Three Camps is a military drumming piece over 200 years old, based on rolls and accents in a triplet rhythm. I've been playing it since drum corps legend Ghost (known to his mother as Bill Linen) taught me an unusual (possibly mis-remembered) version in 1982. Since at least Charles Wilcoxon's day, drummers have been using it as a template for working on other things- accented singles, paradiddles, ratamacues, etc. Here's what I could find online and in my own library: 


Books

The Moeller Book, and Haskell Harr Drum Method, book 2
Each of these has it written out in the archaic notation, with an unusual ending in Harr- two 5-stroke rolls plus release. Due to the notation they're pretty useless to modern users readers.

Rudimental Swing Studies for the Advanced Drummer by Charlie Wilcoxon
In traditional form, paradiddles, and ratamacues. Unfortunately both the original edition and the typo-riddled Sakal edition present it with the old-fashioned notation, though it's marginally more readable than the Moeller version. (To be fair to Mr. Sakal, I think there are many more typos in his edition of Rolling in Rhythm than in RSS. Still looking for an original edition of RIR to confirm that...)

Intermediate Snare Drum Studies by Mitchell Peters
Includes the usual triplet roll form (in modern notation), and in rolls with a 16th note, quintuplet, and sixtuplet pulsation.

Variations on Three Camps by Marvin Dahlgren
This was an unexpected find. I was continuing my so-far-in-vain search for a copy of Dahlgren's Drum Set Control, and came across Really Good Music, which publishes his books- including DSC. According to the site: "The first half of the book is designed primarily for Snare Drum. The second half is designed for use with Drum Set. As usual with Marv Dahlgren books, one can easily spend the rest of your life perfecting these patterns. This 61 page book is in easy to read manuscript with sticking patterns indicated." Naturally I ordered a copy- along with DSC and a book I had never heard of, Complete Text for the Rock & Roll Drummer. I'll let you know when I get them.

Variazioni in Three Camps by Daniele Sabatini
Never seen this before. Ten different variations. No information on what they are, but the preview has it written in flamacues. Available through a German site.

Online versions after the break:

Online

Snarescience.com
Written as triplets, no rolls, with a modified ending- two beats of accented triplets plus a release, instead of the traditional triplet figure with a ruff, or the four-beat fp roll which is the way I learned it. The Accent Percussion Project has an identical version.

In the snarescience.com forum there's also an unusual polyrhythmic version- the first page of it, anyway- someone who calls himself teh_guardian has changed the note values to 8th notes, while keeping the same actual number of notes, giving a 6/8-within-4/4 feel.

Rudimentaldrumming.com
Here's an otherwise conventional version written as sixtuplets in 2/4, using Berger notation.

Robinengelman.com
The image above is from a c. 1784 book mentioned on Engelman's site- it's not complete, so I include it here as a curiosity. You could write him and ask for a scan of the complete piece.

And there's my screwy old version, which has the 3rd camp in the middle, and no restatement of the second camp. There was a period of years from the late 80's to the mid 90's when I never played it- I might've remembered it wrong when I recovered it. I think I'm right, though- I remember it being substantially shorter than the traditional version. And it's hard to forget these things once you've played them hundreds of times.

Finally, I saw Elvin Jones perform it on the drums in a clinic c. 2000; he doubled the accents with the bass drum, and played a two measure drum solo at the end of each time through. I was hoping there would be video of that (or at another clinic) on YouTube, but no.

5s around the drums

I've enjoying practicing my previous around-the-drums things so much, I thought I'd run it through a few iterations- similar to my multi-page paradiddle exercise- and see what we get. Today it's 16th note 5s, using  the easily-flowing RLLRR/LRRLL sticking:

As I've outlined previously, once the single measures are happening, start combining measures- the notes in parentheses are to facilitate that without having to do a crossover. On the second page I've also given some formats for playing these as 8th notes or 16th notes in 5/4 or 5/8.

Get the pdf

Basic beats

Here's a rare bone for my younger/beginning-er readers. What we have here is a collection of basic "rock" beats- really they're good for many/most varieties of popular music using the drum set. The names I've given them are just for convenience- you can use any of these on any kind of music where this general type of thing is suitable. They're just what I call them.

For clarity, I've also given the snare and bass drum parts without the hihat, along with the combined rhythm of those parts. You don't necessarily need to practice those parts, unless you're having trouble with the complete beat.

Get the pdf.

Tom moves

This Elvin thing is turning into a real epic- well, a very small epic, maybe, if you think about it- and I still have to complete the transcription. Here are the tom moves I would apply to the left hand part on yesterday's post- you can/should do these with any other left hand coordination materials, too, of course.

Key:
S = snare drum (normally, or as a rim click)
H = high tom
L = low tom

Between two drums: 
S H S H
S L S L
H L H L

Away from/back to one drum:
S H S L
H S H L
L S L H

Up and down the drums: 
S H L
S L H

You can extrapolate your own patterns if you have one of those monster drumsets with three tom toms. I like to do things the easy way, so I do the moves when there's plenty of time- I don't split the doubles between drums. Depending on the number of notes in the rhythmic pattern vs. the particular move above, there will often be a little polyrhythmic counter-melody generated by doing these- it's a good idea to count out loud and keep track of the four measure phrase in that case. When doing this Elvin thing, for example, count 1-2-3, 2-2-3, 3-2-3, 4-2-3.

How much to practice something

1. Get wood chisel.
2. Remove everything that doesn't look like
Billy the Kid deftly gunning down Bat Masterson
before the throng of stunned onlookers, a yapping
yellow hound at his feet.
3. SUCCESS!

One of the big persistent things nagging most drummers is the question of how much to do. When have you practiced something enough to consider it basically learned, so you can move on with confidence? Some teachers and other not-very-helpful individuals will tell you to just do everything, a lot! You have to be good, man! Were you aware that Weckl practiced 12 hours a day for X years? 

That's great, thanks. You make a mental note to dump a drink down his back at some point, and go back to living with the uncertainty. It's a familiar story.

Here, then, are some guidelines; in general, you can begin to feel you've learned a thing when:

It's memorized. At least so you don't have to look at the book while you play it. You don't necessarily need to be able to pull up everything from memory at a later date. And this doesn't apply to reading practice, EG: the long exercises in Syncopation.

You can play it in a practical range of tempos for the associated style. Part of your job is to listen to music so you know what that range is. If you're playing through some, for example, bossa nova related materials, you should feel good with them from about 88-180 bpm, and especially from 120-150.

"...a relaxed groove develops." One of the best suggestions in Even in the Odds. Try to achieve that at least at one tempo in a single practice session.

You have control over your dynamics. You can play it louder and especially much softer than your "generic" practice volume.

You can play it from a stop. The complete thing; no starting with one or more limbs and adding the hard part last. This is very challenging for a lot of students; often you can do it by just isolating the first few notes of the pattern.

More after the break:


You can get into it from something else without stopping. At least from the previous exercise, but maybe also from a generic time feel in the style. If you're working on an elaborate funk beat, be able to get into it from a more basic funk beat.

You can recover from mistakes. Without losing track of where you are in the measure- you should at least know where the next down beat falls. An intermediate step towards this is to at least not lose the tempo you were playing (assuming you weren't using a click) and jump back on it.

Your mistakes stop sounding like mistakes, and more like variations. They are accurate and in time, and played with a good sound- you played a good note in the "wrong" place according to the stupid book. I don't call those mistakes, actually, I call them "music trying to happen." You should try to harness those accidents a little bit- try to repeat them when they happen, or at least understand what you did.

You can make variations on the fly, or fills, and get back to the original thing. Formats for practicing this could be:

||: 1x as written | 1x variation :||

or 

||: 3x as written | 1x variation :||

or 

||: 2x as written | 1x variation | 1x as written :||     

At that point, you can consider yourself basically competent with a piece of practice material, and can safely move on to the next thing. Some things you'll want to work on much more, either because they're so fundamental to drumming you have to work on them forever, or you need to have them highly developed for the kind of drummer you want to be, or because want to make them a special part of your personal thing.

In general, you don't need to trouble yourself with:


Learning everything at extremely slow or extremely fast tempos. These are a real productivity-killer. In actual playing, each of those situations are somewhat special circumstances that call for dedicated practice time apart from your regular routine. Keep in mind that you do need play new things slow enough that you can do them perfectly- sometimes that will put them at what feels to you like an extremely slow tempo.

The millions of variations/modifications you can do on any written thing. I can pile on so many things to do with a basic rock beat that you would never get past the first thing in the book if you tried to do them all at once. Don't practice that way. Get the one thing at hand, and move on.


All of the above don't necessarily apply exactly equally to every single thing you do. You (and your teacher) have to be able to judge the difference between core things on which your entire drumming career depends (which you need to practice a lot), and things that are more background facility-developers (which can grind you to a standstill if you try to do too much with them). For jazz drummers, most of the things done with Syncopation would fall into the first category; Dahlgren & Fine would fall into the second.

Typos in Funky Primer

Time to get out your white-out again. This is something that had been bugging me for many years of working with A Funky Primer, by my old professor, Charles Dowd. Most of the book consists of bass drum and snare drum combinations along with 8th notes on the hihat. A few places, though, there are these oddball patterns where the hihat falls on the e's and a's:

There's nothing wrong with the pattern, I guess, except that it makes no sense in context- there's nothing else like it anywhere in the book, except these few random measures. After a couple decades of just ignoring those patterns, it dawned on me that when you beam the notes this way:

The result is exactly what you would expect for that page of the book. I imagine the copyist was getting in a groove with his work, and got a little cocky about knowing where the beams were supposed to go without double-checking his master copy, and screwed it up.

A couple more of these after the break:

These two are from the "hands only" part of the book:

Properly beamed this becomes:

And this pattern:

Becomes: