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

Coordination "kernels" - further examples

You may have noticed I've been on rather light posting this last week. Expect that to continue for the next several days; this week I'll be recording my new CD for the Origin label, Little Played Little Bird (the music of Ornette Coleman; stay tuned for info on pre-ordering!), and have been very busy with pre-production stuff. Mainly obsessing over my charts- transcribed off the record and arranged by me- and practicing.

Today at least I have some examples relating to my earlier coordination kernels post. These are taken from Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, plus a couple of generic versions of the Afro-Cuban cascara, which you can read more about in Malabe & Weiner's Afro-Cuban Rhythms for Drumset, among other places:

Refer back to the original post for instruction on how to apply my method. Note that each cascara groove is composed of three "kernels". Learn each one individually, and then put them together as outlined previously; first with open space between each kernel, then gradually flowing from one to the next until they make the desired rhythm of the complete groove.

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.

Todd's methods: bongo beat

Here's an easy system I developed for playing a generic Latin feel very bright tempos:

A few notes there weren't room for on the pdf:
- Can be played very fast and very light.
- Also combine exercise measures to make two measure phrases.
- Pay attention to the sound of your rim clicks and rim shots.
- When applying the floor tom variation, play the FT on the & of two of the second measure.
- Also play right hand part on cymbal or bell.
- Improvise your own variations.

Get the pdf.

Drum chart: Mamblues by Cal Tjader

Here is a chart of Mamblues, from Cal Tjader's album Soul Sauce, transcribed by me. It's a pretty straightforward (but burning!) salsa tune on a blues form, with a cascara groove, mambo on the vibes solo. If you haven't played a lot of this type of chart, note that the written grooves are for illustration only- you should play whatever version of the grooves you have together, making sure to follow clave. The roadmap is straightforward- take the repeats for the solos, then the DS and coda.

Download the pdf | get the mp3 | get the CD

YouTube clip after the break:

Here's Cal Tjader playing Mamblues with Mongo Santamaria; it's a little different from the version I used, which was on Tjader's Soul Sauce: