Tom moves revisited

I've been using these moves around the drums a lot in my own practice-- if you've been working with the Elvin's Afro Waltz series, you probably have too-- and have evolved them slightly, so I thought I'd share that with you. As you can see here, I've added some inversions of the main moves:

Key:
S = snare drum (normal stroke, or rim click)
H = high tom
L = low tom

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

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

Down / up the drums, or clockwise / counterclockwise: 
S H L / H L S / L S H
S L H / L S H / H S L

The reason for the extra inversions is that when doing a moving part with the same number of notes per measure as there are in the move, the resulting pattern will start on the same drum every measure. So, you may want to explore some other possibilities. It takes more time to do the extra patterns, so I do them when I want to hear something else happen musically with a pattern; I don't necessarily do them routinely. There's certainly no need to do them when the pattern starts on a different drum every measure/repeat.

One more thing: You could do these with one note only per drum, but I will generally put doubles or multiples on one drum, and do the moves when there's enough time to make them easily. So, this pattern from the first installment of the Elvin thing:

...would be played like this when using the SHL move:

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.