Stick Control in triplets

Here's a good library companion to my Stick Control implied rhythms piece. This was suggested to me by my friend Steve Pancerev-- I'm not sure if it's something he thought up, or if it was suggested by his old teacher, Ian Froman. The concept is simple enough-- just apply the stickings from the first section of Stick Control to a triplet rhythm-- figuring out on the fly how that lays is more challenging, though, so I've written it out. You might pencil in phrase marks to outline the four note groupings where they're not so easy to make out.

Usually you just run exercises 1-13, but what the heck, I went ahead and wrote up the whole page. The big challenge here is to play the RH part on the snare drum and the LH part on the bass drum along with jazz time on the cymbal and hihat. You could also play the RH part on the cymbal, doubled with the bass drum, and the left hand on the snare drum.

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Stick Control implied rhythms

I hope you dig all of this Stick Control stuff; I just happen to be working with this book a lot right now. One of my reservations I've always had about it- about the way the first three pages apply to the drums, anyway- is that the musical content is hidden behind the sticking patterns. And I don't want to base my playing on patterns of Rs and Ls, I want to base it on common musical language. So what I've done here is give the rhythm suggested by the right hand part of exercises 1-72 from the front of the book; if you drop out the left hand, or accent the right, these are the rhythms that pop out. I've written the more syncopated rhythms jazz style (as in Ted Reed), with long notes on the &s wherever possible. For easy reference, I've put them in the same format as the original:

Keeping these pages handy while working with the Stone exercises on the drumset will get one seeing the rhythmic content behind the exercises in fairly short order. If like me you use Stone and Reed a lot, hopefully making the connection between the two will encourage some different ways of thinking about each. I would be cautious about the way you apply this to snare drum practice, however; hanging everything off of the right hand is a normal thing on the drums, but when working strictly on hand technique you want to be more balanced.

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More Stone on the drums

Here's something timely to the ECM feel post. I've been using Stick Control quite a bit in my practicing lately- particularly my application in 5/4 (and a similar thing in 7/4), and in fooling with it began using this simple but effective variation:

These are most effective in a moderate to bright 2. Definitely experiment with substituting your own fills for the given triplets/roll.

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