Kernels of Cascara

My students have been doing so well with my "kernels" concept that I've decided to write up a real challenge for them: cascara with the clave in the left foot. It was the hip thing du jour two years ago, and it will still blow away the other kids around the band room. The kernel of the kernel concept is to find the natural clumps of notes within a pattern, and practice them in isolation at the final performance tempo, or close to it, and then stringing them together.

As I've said before, the cool thing about this approach is that it helps fairly inexperienced drummers to get difficult things up to speed in fairly short order. It also insures that the internals of the pattern are solid. I've found it to be a nice addition to the usual slow-to-fast  way of overcoming coordination challenges, and much more effective than the equally common (in the practice room, anyway) brute force approach, in which students inevitably spend a lot of time practicing mistakes.

Instructions are in the pdf; it's a good idea to count each kernel out loud as written as you play them. After mastering the coordination by this method, it's important to bring it back around to perceiving the groove in its usual musical sense, paying special attention to how you are interpreting the palito pattern in the right hand and the clave in the left foot.

Get the pdf

Todd's methods: Afro-Cuban in 6/8 and 3/4

Here's something I wrote strictly for my own use, which I thought I would share for you to make of what you will. The Afro 6/8 has been one of my stronger vehicles for a long time; my approach has always been very Elvin-like- very whole-instrument- and I've recently been working towards more jazz-like freedom with my left hand and right foot. The coordination is an order of magnitude more difficult than in jazz, but just working with it should allow some new things to happen spontaneously even if it takes some time to get full conscious control over it.

One of the major features of African rhythm is that one pattern or one piece of music can be subject to a number of different primary pulses. What I've done here is present the same patterns as 8th notes in 6/8 and as 8ths and 16ths in 3/4, which puts the pulse on the "big" 3- equivalent to half notes in the original 6/8, or a half-note triplet if we were dealing with triplets in 4/4. It's difficult to conceive in the original 6/8, but very straightforward when we put it in a single measure of 3/4.

Get the pdf.

Basic Mambo

I guess I had to eventually post something directly drumming-related on my drumming blog, so here is an older piece I'll be sharing with a couple of students today- some variations on a generic, very basic one-measure mambo-type Latin pattern. Some form of this is usable in actual playing where strict authenticity isn't a primary concern (and there are many such situations), at bright tempos, or when playing with inexperienced musicians unable to follow the more correct patterns.

Get the pdf.

Afro 6/8 - basic coordination

This is something I've been working with daily for several weeks now- getting the usual jazz coordination/comping stuff together with the Afro-Cuban/Bembe/Naningo bell pattern. It's pretty tricky, and it's a good idea to do it with the preparatory ostinatos before attempting the main pattern.

One thing I did early on was play just one or two measures of an ostinato followed by the same number of measures of just hi-hat, playing the coordination patterns the whole time- this is especially good to do with the quarter note/8th note bell pattern (the first pattern on the third line on the page).

As it says in the notes, once you're comfortable with the given ways of practice, you can take a stab at using the common jazz coordination sources, like Chapin, Syncopation, etc. Ed Soph's Essential Techniques has been really useful for this, as well as Rick Mattingly's Creative Timekeeping, and especially Joel Rothman's Compleat Jazz Drummer, which has a comprehensive section on triplet coordination, written in 2/4.

Get the pdf.